Copyright

by
Eliot Briklod Chayt
2014
 The Dissertation Committee for Eliot Briklod Chayt Certifies that
this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Disaster, Dystopia, and Exploration: Science-Fiction

Cinema 1959-1971

Committee:

Joseph Straubhaar, Supervisor

Janet Staiger, Co-Supervisor

Thomas Schatz

Ann Reynolds

Susan McLeland

 
 

 
 
Disaster, Dystopia, and Exploration: Science-Fiction
Cinema 1959-1971

by

Eliot Briklod Chayt, B.A., M.A.

Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of
The University of Texas at Austin
in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin

May 2014
 Acknowledgements

I am indebted to a number of individuals for their assistance in this

dissertation’s origination, development, and completion. I would like to first
thank the members of my committee, in whose classes the germ of this
dissertation was formed. Their feedback helped me to shape the contours of a

project that is in several ways distinct from its initial presentation. I would
also like to thank Michael Kackman for sponsoring an independent research
project that fed into this dissertation. Special thanks are due to Janet
Staiger, who has been a constant source of information and inspiration, for
her support and supervision of this and other projects (including my Master’s
thesis) and, indeed, her immeasurable guidance since my arrival at the
University of Texas at Austin. Thanks also go out to Joseph Straubhaar for
his enthusiastic support and supervision.
Appreciation also goes out to my friends and family, who have
supported me in every possible way, and especially to my parents, Steven and
Meryl Chayt, for their constant loving support. My deepest gratitude goes to
Bonnye Bauerle (and her family) for providing incalculable comfort and
encouragement. Thanks are also due to those who participated in the years of
film discussion and immersion this project demanded and to those in whose
own interests I found commonality and inspiration, including Holly Esther
(and her family), Miranda Tedholm, Susan Broyles, Paul Monticone, and
many others. Thanks are also due to Stephen Miles and Cris Hassold of New

  iv  
College of Florida for fostering my interest in critical theory. Very special
thanks go out to my dear friend Anna McCormick for her many valuable
insights throughout the dissertation’s progress and her assistance in the
preparation of the manuscript. I would finally like to acknowledge the
anonymous distributors and subtitlers of films otherwise neglected by major
home video distributors, without whom this dissertation would not have been
feasible.
 

v  
 
 
 Disaster, Dystopia, and Exploration: Science-Fiction
Cinema 1959-1971

Eliot Briklod Chayt, PhD

The University of Texas at Austin, 2014

Supervisor: Joseph Straubhaar

Co-Supervisor: Janet Staiger

Exploring the products of diverse cinematic modes of production—

including Hollywood as well as art and experimental contexts—and their

surrounding production and reception discourses, this dissertation reveals

the ways in which science-fiction (sf) provided a pervasive influence in the

film culture of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan throughout the

sixties. In this era, three sf plot-types—disaster, dystopia, and exploration—

were mobilized as cultural frames for analyzing contemporary social and

technological change, frequently evoking socially critical and/or progressive

horizons of interpretation. As such, sixties sf cinema provides an antithesis to

the flights of fancy and conservative parables that often epitomized the genre

vi  
 
 
in the fifties.

In this era, therefore, Disaster stories called into question nuclear

proliferation rather than warning against some intruding alien force.

Likewise, Dystopia could be found in Western bourgeois praxis as well as in

communist totalitarianism. Exploration, rather than merely promising a

hegemonic vision of outer space to be achieved through flag-planting galactic

imperialism, could represent the hope for new conceptual and social norms.

vii  
 
 
 Table of Contents

List of Figures .............................................................................................. ix

Introduction: Rediscovering Sixties SF Cinema .................................. 1
Research Question........................................................................................ 5
Sixties Genre Contexts................................................................................. 8
Sample of Films .......................................................................................... 20
Findings and Chapter Outline................................................................... 22
Chapter One: The Rise of Sixties SF Cinema....................................... 27
Cinematic SF in Transformation............................................................... 31
Three Interlocking Discourses: Disaster, Dystopia, and Exploration ..... 43
Chapter Two: Disaster .............................................................................. 50
The Social Problem Melodrama................................................................. 58
Horror and Paranoia .................................................................................. 66
Modernist Melodrama................................................................................ 72
Comedy, Absurdism and Bricolage............................................................ 78
The Imagination of Negation..................................................................... 85
Chapter Three: Dystopia .......................................................................... 87
The Huxleyian-Marcusian Imagination.................................................... 92
Present as Future..................................................................................... 112
The Perfect Prescription .......................................................................... 119
Chapter Four: Exploration..................................................................... 130
Hegemonic Space...................................................................................... 135
Outer and Inner Space............................................................................. 153
Space Camp and Sexual Evolution.......................................................... 161
Conclusion ................................................................................................... 175
References ................................................................................................... 181

viii  
 
 
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1: Konchû daisensô (1968) begins and ends with a mushroom cloud, the first actual
and the second imagined.   49  
Fig. 2.1: The War Game (1965) depicts victims of a nuclear catastrophe that strikes Great
Britain.   52  
Fig. 2.2: In On the Beach (1959), a Coca-Cola bottle provides the last hope for the human
race.   62  
Fig. 2.3: The celluloid itself burns up at the conclusion of The Bedford Incident (1965).   71  
Fig. 2.4: In Il seme dell’uomo (1969), a painting on the beach symbolizes global destruction.78  
Fig. 2.5: The mise-en-scène of The Bed-Sitting Room (1969) evokes the era’s artistic
assemblages as well as Land art/Environments.   84  
Fig. 3.1: The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968)’s “The Hungry Angry Show” mixes food and
violence.   102  
Fig. 3.2: Claire Bloom and Rod Steiger face future ennui in The Illustrated Man (1969).   105  
Fig. 3.3: The accident that begins THX-1138 (1971) is revealed on surveillance monitors.   105  
Fig. 3.4: La decima vittima (1965): “You can’t shoot in bars.”   106  
Fig. 3.5: A human (Gina Zuckerman) celebrates freedom from toil while her Fleshapoids,
including Xar (Bob Cowan), serve her hand and foot in Sins of the Fleshpoids (1965)  110  
Fig. 3.6: In Marcia nuzale (1965), marriage is “solved” via the creation of android “spouses.”
  111  
Fig. 3.7: PlayTime (1967) visualizes compartmentalization.   113  
Fig. 3.8: In Omicron (1963), alien visitor Omicron has the power to see through class
relations (and clothing).   116  
Fig. 3.9: A Book Person from Fahrenheit 451 (1966) returns to freely chosen manual labor.
  120  
Fig. 3.10: In Gas-s-s-s (1970), worldwide catastrophe ends in hippie communalism.   121  
Fig. 3.11: In Seconds, Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson) finds a literal Bacchanal no less alienating
than his old life as banker Arthur Hamilton.   124  
Fig. 3.12: An explicit statement of Marxist Utopian negation in Ice (1970)   125  
Fig. 3.13: In Ice (1970), negation is also represented formally through the use of negative
images.   126  
Fig. 4.1: A pensive Lt. Dan (Bill Edwards) on the verge of becoming the First Man Into Space
(1959)   139  
Fig. 4.2: Lt. Dan (Bill Edwards) post-transformation in First Man Into Space (1959)   141  
Fig. 4.3: Freed from slavery, Friday (Victor Lundin) willingly offers his services to American
Kit Draper (Paul Mantee) in Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964).   147  
Fig. 4.4: Professor Konrad (Paul Birch) captivates the Venusian women in Queen of Outer
Space (1958), a prototypical “space camp” film.   163  
Fig. 4.5: Lou Costello makes an unimposing king of Mars in Abbott & Costello Go to Mars
(1953).   164  
Fig. 4.6: The Martian “queen” (Florence Marly) is a puzzling sight in Queen of Blood (1966).
  168  
Fig. 4.7: Martian eggs represent exciting future possibilities in Queen of Blood (1966).   169

ix  
 
 
  

Introduction: Rediscovering Sixties SF Cinema

During my high school years I counted 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

as my favorite film and so, when I graduated in the year 2001, it seemed only

appropriate to me that I should suggest to my school’s graduation committee

that Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra be played at some point

during the graduation ceremony. The response was one of enthusiasm partly,

I imagine, because playing the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey in 2001

indicated something significant to the baby boomer administrators on this

sentimental occasion: the future had now arrived and the newest generation

was being sent out on their own odyssey of discovery (corny, but, then again,

at such events sentimentality reigns). At the last minute, however, the plans

were changed without my knowledge and the Star Wars (1977) theme was

played instead. For the teacher who had inherited the job of sound engineer,

this theme was no doubt personally meaningful and more adequately

expressed the triumphant mood of the occasion. I was no fan of Star Wars,

and my knee-jerk response was that the substitution of John Williams for

Strauss (and Star Wars for 2001: A Space Odyssey) was philistine. Besides,

what did the year 2001 have to do with Star Wars anyway?

Although this story is especially anecdotal, it nevertheless nicely

illustrates the frequent linking and association of 2001: A Space Odyssey and

1  
 
 
Star Wars within the popular imagination as the two most memorable

science fiction (hereafter, sf) films of New Hollywood. Yet, if Star Wars,

together with the sf films of Steven Spielberg, is agreed to have paved the

path for subsequent sf blockbusters, it is more difficult today to situate 2001:

A Space Odyssey within a film industrial production and reception context

based in the consideration of genre. 2001: A Space Odyssey stands out as the

“significant” sf film of the sixties both popularly and critically.1

This situation is no doubt at least partially due to the film’s scholarly

and critical canonization, which has had the effect of privileging it over and

above all other sf films of the period. That 2001: A Space Odyssey overwhelms

sf film criticism as such further exacerbates the situation. Stanley Kubrick’s

film is often surrounded by grandiose claims that it provides the unique

                                                                                                               
1 For instance, 2001: A Space Odyssey is number 3 on the aggregator site They Shoot
Pictures Don’t They? List of the “1000 Greatest Films” (www.theyshootpictures.com,
as of 2/13/2014), number 15 on the AFI’s Top 100 List
(www.afi.com/docs/100years/movies100.pdf, as of 2/13/2014), number 19 on the
IMDB’s “Top 250” movie list (www.imdb.com, as of 2/9/2014) and is also included in
Steven Jay Schneider (2003)’s popular 1000 Movies You Must See Before You Die,
Roger Ebert (2002)’s “The Great Movies” series, Jonathan Rosenbaum (2004a)’s list
of “Essential Films,” the New York Times’ Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made (Nichols
1999), and the National Film Registry (www.loc.gov/film/registry_titles.php, as of
2/13/2014).

2  
 
 
exception to the rule that sf cinema represents a poor excuse for intelligent

entertainment, compared for instance to literary sf.

Sf scholar Carl Freedman, for instance, claims that although most sf

aficionados consider sf genre films as “frankly escapist” “lightweight mass

entertainment,” 2001 is the only real instance of a serious and substantial sf

film (1998, 300-31). For Joan Dean, likewise, 2001: A Space Odyssey created

the possibility for “artistically sound Science Fiction films” (1979, 33).2 Such

rhetoric is not purely post-facto but is also evident in the contemporaneous

criticism of the film. A notable Los Angeles Times op-ed piece by scientist

Walt Lee, for instance, claims that “2001: A Space Odyssey” is the “first

science-fiction motion picture to reach [a] level of intelligent speculation”

(1968, C14).

This evaluation and canonization itself reveals three larger tendencies

in film criticism. The first tendency is an emphasis on industrial histories,

which privilege the production cycles of the Hollywood majors. Even within
                                                                                                               
2 Dean claims that whereas 2001 “raised the genre to its apogee,” Star Wars merely
“raised box-office receipts to theirs” (1979, 32). Jonathan Rosenbaum likewise claims
that Star Wars is the “anti-2001,” a symbolic return to the “giddy space opera” sf
mode of “Flash Gordon” (1997, 105-108). Robin Wood similarly coined the “Lucas-
Spielberg Syndrome” to describe a blockbuster Hollywood ideology predicated on
“childishness,” “special effects,” “imagination,” and “nuclear anxiety” (1986, 162-
174). For Freedman, 2001: A Space Odyssey had “transcended” “classical narrative,”
while both Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) return the
genre to the “lightweight mass entertainment” of the fifties cycle (1998, 301-304).

3  
 
 
histories of the genre, the sixties is disregarded as a merely “transitional”

period between the fifties cycle of Hollywood B-movies and a second cycle of

films which emerged after the unexpected success of Planet of the Apes (1968)

and culminated in earnest after the even greater successes of Star Wars and

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).3 Thereupon, the modern sf

blockbuster became a staple of New Hollywood. Drawing conclusions about

the genre from existing historical film scholarship could easily lead one to the

impression that very little sf material emerged in the sixties. Mark Harris’s

judgment that sf was “more than a decade out of style” at the time of 2001: A

Space Odyssey is possible only by focusing solely on the limited scope of the

major studios’ increasingly diminished A-output (2008, 285).4

The second tendency is the prejudice against considering art films

within the context of genre. The exceptions to this rule are of course the

auteurist New Hollywood films of generic “demythologization,” which may be

considered art films but which the industry marketed as genre films. The

third is the choice to use genre in a purely evaluative sense and therefore

eschew the consideration of genre’s internal discourses. Doing so relies

                                                                                                               
3 A prominent example is Manfred Nagl (1983)’s sf genre trajectory.
4 Even then, Harris’s judgment remains curious, considering the substantial
presence of Hollywood sf on television and the persistence of the sf spectacle from
the likes of George Pal and Irwin Allen.

4  
 
 
instead on the notion of the sf film genre itself as a rhetorical category

representing a universal exception to the significance a film such as 2001: A

Space Odyssey is said to provide.

Research Question

If a side effect of the canonization of 2001: A Space Odyssey has been

the obscuring of all other sixties sf films from the scholarly imagination, the

research question of the present work is therefore: Can the sixties be said to

provide a distinct period of sf cinema marked by specific overriding artistic

tendencies (and of which 2001: A Space Odyssey is an example)? If so, what

frameworks and discourses define this period?

It should be established at the onset that at the very least (and

contrary to scholarly acknowledgement) a large number of sf films were

produced throughout the sixties not only within B-production contexts, but

also especially within commercial prestige and art cinematic production.

Rather than claiming Kubrick’s film as the unique instance of inspired sf, I

will instead argue that 2001: A Space Odyssey was a relative latecomer in

what had been a decade of artistic renewal for the genre. A film such as On

the Beach (1959), which portrayed in detail the social and psychological

effects of the world on the brink of utter extinction by radiation, provided a

basis for considering a serious and intellectually challenging engagement

5  
 
 
with the genre.5 François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), which depicts a

sterile and repressive future self-consciously composed of recognizable

twentieth-century hallmarks—provides auteurism, art cinema narration, and

genre subversion—avoiding sf clichés in favor of high modernist forms of

distanciation to stress the genre’s potential for thoughtful allegory. And if

Jonathan Rosenbaum claimed 2001: A Space Odyssey as a “contemplative”

exploration of “intelligence” that resonates with the most recent films of

Jean-Luc Godard (1997, 105-108), it should be recalled that Godard himself

crafted two sf films in the sixties, Il nuovo mondo (a segment of the

portmanteau film Ro.Go.Pa.G [1963]) and Alphaville (1965).

The sf sixties field contains a range of films from the auteurs of art

cinema—including Chris Marker’s La jetée (La Jetée or The Jetty, 1962),

Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Tanin no kao (The Face of Another, 1966), and Alain

Resnais’s Je t’aime je t’aime (1968), to name a few—as well as such

significant oddities as Barbarella (1968), Richard Lester and Spike Milligan’s

The Bed-Sitting Room (1969), and the speculative cycle of Cold War anxiety

films including Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying

and Love the Bomb (1964) and its companion Fail-Safe (1964), The Bedford

Incident (1965), and Peter Watkins’s pseudo-documentary of nuclear

                                                                                                               
5 On the Beach was released in 1959. However, it has more in common with the sf
films of the following years than those of the preceding.

6  
 
 
catastrophe The War Game (1965). Italy also produced several remarkable sf

films during this era, including Ugo Gregoretti’s Omicron (1963), Elio Petri’s

La decima vittima (The Tenth Victim, 1965), and Marco Ferreri’s Il seme

dell’uomo (The Seed of Man, 1969). Sf looms large in films of the sixties: Je

t’aime Je t’aime was to have opened the 1968 Cannes Film Festival.

Furthermore, entirely absent from the scholarship is an acknowledgment

that the Underground filmmakers were experimenting with sf sources and

tropes in films including Mike Kuchar’s The Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965)

and Andy Warhol’s Vinyl (1965).

But although a diverse number of sf films were certainly produced, this

alone does not guarantee the existence of a coherent body of works with

significant commonalities. Indeed, considering the diversity of the above list,

it is perhaps unsurprising that the prevailing attitude has been to consider

the sixties films as resistant to such aggregate classification. For instance, in

tracing the development of commercial sf films from the 1900s to the early

1980s, sf scholar Manfred Nagl calls the sixties field a uniquely

“heterogeneous body” (1983, 268). John Baxter likewise claims that the

sixties cinematic sf field “presents a confused face to the world . . . generally

adher[ing] to traditional concepts and approaches, but mixed with those of

other fields” (1970, 195).

Answering the question of whether the sixties sf films are in any way

7  
 
 
“united” by common visions does more than fill a gap in the scholarship on

the history of sf cinema. It also holds significance for understanding the

broader intellectual and aesthetic culture of which these films are a part. If

works conceived within the auspices of the speculative sf genre are often

considered documents of the fears and desires of their time of creation, then

understanding sixties sf will help to enlighten further the ideological

frameworks from within which filmmakers and audiences perceived an

especially transformative historical period marked by rapid social and

technological change. Furthermore, the answer to this question will provide

an illustration of the value in evaluating films that elicit genre categories in

emphatic ways but which are nevertheless ignored as generic products due to

the discursive (industrial, taste-cultural, etc.) associations of a “genre”

framework.

Sixties Genre Contexts

Considering even 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) within the context of

genre is no simple matter since genre is an elusive category with competing

models. Underlying this debate is that a genre is not a stable formal or

archetypal category but rather an ad hoc descriptive category with a range of

functions. Drawing from the work of several genre scholars including Andrew

Tudor, Tom Gunning, and Rick Altman, Janet Staiger (1997) for instance

8  
 
 
presents many such models. Nevertheless, one overarching function of

generic classification within cinema is the practical aim of standardizing and

differentiating formulaic products and marketing techniques in a Fordist

mode of production like Classical Hollywood (Staiger 1997, 11). But beyond

market differentiation, genres also provide a set of formal and narrative

possibilities the emerging patterns of which open up a horizon of expectations

for producers and viewers. The study of genre can therefore encompass the

dynamics of the industry’s production as well as the forms that emerge,

including the wealth of generated discourses.

Focusing on the industrial definition of genre, Bradley Schauer has

attempted to chart the increasing growth of sf from a B-level to A-level genre

in the years 1950-1986. In doing so he has relied on the notion that prior to

Star Wars (1977) sf consistently functioned as an “exploitation” genre due to

a failure “to establish sf [sic] as a viable A-level genre in the 1950s (2010,

23).” Within the industrial context of Schauer’s argument, high-profile films

including 2001: A Space Odyssey and Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966) must

remain exceptions to this rule. However, I argue that the Hollywood’s big-

budget production patterns hardly provide a sufficient context for

understanding these sixties products within the context of genre. Doing so

ignores the broader cultural position of sf and cinema. Not simply exceptions

to a rule, films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Fahrenheit 451 are

9  
 
 
emblems of a period in which both cinema and sf most clearly gave

themselves to special artistic and critical attention. I argue that this is the

clearest context for understanding the rise of a range of prestige, art, and

experimental sf films.

Shyon Baumann has for instance claimed that the sixties in particular

represented a multi-front effort to legitimate the cinematic medium in

America by turning the film field of production into an “art world” (2007, 3).6

According to Baumann, factors contributing to this development included the

“growth of art house theaters,” “the relaxation of film censorship,” a shift

toward a “director-centered system” and, especially, the “creation of a

discourse of film as art,” which he links to the influential position of film

reviewers during this period (2007, 3). Indeed, film buffs certainly belong to

“high culture” by the mid-seventies, according to American sociologist of taste

Herbert Gans (1999, 115). Peter Cowie has claimed that the sixties wrought

an international film “revolution” sparked by a “European filmmaking

frenzy” that had gradually increased in the post-war years and which reached

a watershed with the 1959 Cannes Film Festival’s presentation of the French

New Wave to the international film community (2004, 47). Through his

discussion of the U.S. financing and production of the Euro-American art

                                                                                                               
6 This argument draws on the theories of Howard Becker (1982), who posits “art
worlds” as sub-cultural networks.

10  
 
 
film, Peter Lev (1993) has shown that American institutions increasingly

played a key role in the international film movement that followed. Similarly,

American cinephiles participated in international film culture by cultivating

simultaneous tastes for the many flavors of art cinema—including

independent, experimental, and foreign films—especially in the largest urban

centers such as New York and Los Angeles. New Republic film reviewer

Stanley Kaufmann famously dubbed the critically inclined and youth-

dominated audience of the era “the film generation” (Cowie 2004, 47).

This change in the cultural position of cinema that occurred in the

sixties mirrored a similar shift in the field of literary sf during the same

decade. Edward James for instance points out that by the time sf coalesced

internationally as a recognized magazine genre around 1960 it was a polyglot

cultural form like “the Hollywood movie” (1994, 54). But James claims that a

push away from magazine publication toward novels in the fifties and sixties

represented a move “toward greater literary respectability” (1994, 62). The

sixties, therefore, seems to represent a cultural crossroads for sf between the

magazine era represented by the flagship publication Astonishing Science

Fiction and the respectable sf represented by the publication of an increasing

number of “literary” novels just as it represents a crossroads for sf cinema

between fifties exploitation films and films such as Fahrenheit 451 and 2001:

A Space Odyssey.

11  
 
 
 During the sixties and seventies sf would further gain academic

prominence due in part to its relationship with the left. This tendency would

be epitomized by the theoretical writings of Darko Suvin, who claims that sf

marries a novum (a speculative, anticipatory element driving the plot) with a

form of “cognitive estrangement” in a manner fashioned after a Russian

formalist understanding of ostraneniye (1979, 1).7 Suvin’s treatment of genre

reminds us that central to modern film genre criticism is the notion that

genre’s schematic function extends beyond formal coherence into the realm of

meaningfulness: generic conventions and expectations generate a horizon of

interpretation. Meanings are embodied in iconography and formulas, which

are structured by ideology.8

In cinema, the cultural mythos surrounding the American “frontier”

habitually informs the Westerns. Sf likewise concerns the notions of

enlightenment and progress. While the Western draws attention to history, sf

often draws attention to considerations about the future and to interpretative

                                                                                                               
7 Simon Spiegel (2008) considers Suvin’s theorization of “cognitive estrangement”
unfortunately imprecise. However, more pertinent perhaps is the long-standing
historical alignment between leftists and Utopian thought as well as with sf
literature, which includes Suvin.
8 Wood (2003) provides the relevant treatise of this interpretation of genre.

12  
 
 
frames based upon speculation and Utopian anticipation.9 Suvin’s linking of

sf to both constructivist aesthetics and to the Marxist-inspired Utopian

theorizations of Ernst Bloch further serves as a reminder that the writings

and production culture of the sf “Golden Age” itself often provided

fundamentally socialist alternatives to capitalist ideology [as noted for

instance by Charles Elkins (1979, 25)]. Such overtly political aesthetic

tendencies would also re-appear in the sixties, during which twenties and

thirties aesthetics were recuperated to become a major trend in the visual

                                                                                                               
9 The sociological analysis of sf cinema goes back at least as far as 1965 when, in
“The Imagination of Disaster,” Susan Sontag described the sf cinema since 1950 as a
form of fantasy sublimating contemporary sociological and psychological concerns—
notably the fear of the bomb—into visual spectacle. Although Sontag’s essay is a sly
appreciation of the popular genre, as an ideological critique her argument
remarkably prefigures Fredric Jameson’s more transparent adaptation of Frankfurt
School arguments for cinema as a mass-culture force of reification in “Reification
and Utopia in Mass Culture” (1979) which utilizes as its primary example Jaws
(1975). Jaws, with its band of masculine professionals banding together to route the
film’s nearly supernatural super-shark, contains, of course, more than a passing
thematic and narrative resemblance to the sf invasion and monster films of the
fifties, particularly War of the Worlds (1953) (which director Steven Spielberg later
re-made himself in 2005). Peter Biskind (1983; 1985) further brings out this
narrative commonality with his claim that fifties sf narratives are concerned with
challenges to the social order rather than scientific anxieties per se, and Adam Knee
has subsequently argued at length that the fifties films “narratively exemplify [the
era’s] containment culture’ in their preoccupation with trying to observe and clarify
borders of various kinds—conceptualized in gendered and racial terms” (1997, 20).

13  
 
 
and performing arts.10

Within sixties sf, this overtly political context returned in the feminist

and countercultural “new wave” sf literature as well as within prominent

examples of sf cinema.11 Fail-Safe, Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop

Worrying and Love the Bomb, and The Bedford Incident all have a history of

reception as prominent progressive post-Cuban Missile Crisis social problem

pictures (and are duly included in Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner’s [1988]

pantheon of Hollywood left-wing films of the era) but are not often considered

within the context of the sf genre, despite being examples of speculative

fiction relying on a narrative logic rooted in nova and various estrangement

techniques.

The recuperation of sf cinema as a viable form of social critique was

linked to the unsettled position of the film medium within the cultural

hierarchy. In the sixties, filmgoing could offer a counter-cultural experience

based in what Rosenbaum calls “the melting-pot”: a cinema culture in which

a cross-influence among avant-garde, European, and commercial American

                                                                                                               
10 Philip Glahn discusses of the significance of Bertold Brecht, for instance,
throughout the “American arts community of the 1960s” (2007, 44-45).
11 Rob Latham (2006) provides a history of the mid-sixties split in sf literature and
fandom between “old” and “new.” Christopher L. Leslie claims that the label “New
wave” was a self-conscious attempt to link new trends in sf to the cinematic Nouvelle
Vague (2007, 50).

14  
 
 
films was rampant and all encompassing (2004b, 131; see also Hoberman and

Rosenbaum 1983). “In New York,” Cowie writes, “the passion for ‘foreign

movies’ blended somewhat with the city’s yen for experiment—documentary,

and formal experimentation” (2004, 47). Film’s potential to offer an activity of

critical engagement, spectatorial experimentation, and a site for cultural and

public exchange became more accepted, with an engaged “film generation”

excited to partake in art films and Roger Corman films with equal voracity

(Monaco 2003, 45). Overt generic manipulation is a frequently noted feature

of this “melting-pot” context, as auteurist re-interpretations and inversions of

generic tropes function in concert with the perverse spectatorship of savvy

audiences already accustomed to reading films “against the grain.”

While it is often claimed that even within Classical Hollywood, genre

could prove a usefully malleable system,12 when the opportunity arises to

create a film outside the context of genre, the playful interrogation,

undermining, and mutation of generic expectations remain key cinematic

authorship strategies. However, when considering the difference between

2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars, it is hardly sufficient to note simply

                                                                                                               
12 See for instance, Staiger (1997). This notion is also the basis for Andrew Sarris’s
(1996) brand of auteurism.

15  
 
 
that both films provide examples of auteurist and potentially revisionist sf.13

What is missing from this equation is a dynamic framework to account for

the various ways in which genre formulas may be invoked within their

historical production and reception contexts. Investigating genre subversion

as an element of alternative or oppositional practice even within the

commercial system provides the basis for a sincere critique of claims that the

sixties hybrid forms provided resistance to commercial and ideological norms,

that is, aside from their incorporation of taste-connoted markers representing

alternative practices. Genre subversion would seem to allow for impurity

even at a film’s most apparently commercial, conformist level. If a film such

as Star Wars would seem to de-radicalize the use of sf to a greater extent

than 2001: A Space Odyssey, this judgment can become clear only through

systematic comparison of the services into which each film conscripts the sf

genre, as the films’ most readily apparent “code.” Likewise, a broader

historical genre context is needed to take into account the defining discourses
                                                                                                               
13 The Western is perhaps most associated with sixties and seventies genre
revisionism, yet both 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars invoke the Western
notion of the “frontier” (reconfigured as the frontier of space). However, whereas
2001 concerns the notion of a “frontier” to represent the traversal of both material
and paradigmatic boundaries through scientific advancement (thereby indicating a
meta-generic movement rather than a true genre subversion), Star Wars merely
utilizes the space frontier as a “threshold” of the hero’s journey.

16  
 
 
a genre engages and mediates within a given historical period.

The sixties historical context almost demanded an evolution of the sf

genre, a coming-of-age. Rocketship stories, for instance, were suddenly

transforming from flights of fancy to prophetic predictions of the rapidly

accelerated space race following the Sputnik launch. At the same time,

nuclear disaster stories personalized the threat of catastrophe.14 Therefore, I

maintain that in the sixties, the sf genre existed not only as a horizon of

interpretation but also as a broader media frame (Goffman 1986) for the

intrusion of these preoccupations into the hermeneutics of everyday life.

Thus, the body of sixties sf films can be understood not merely as an

industrial cluster but as a partial map of the terrain of popular myths and

daydreams the sixties generated. After all, going beyond the context provided
                                                                                                               
14 During the sixties, overlapping popular scientific and sf cultural tropes saturated
the industries of popular culture, turning up with increasing ubiquity as they
became established within the cultural repertoire: In I Dream of Jeannie (1965-
1970), for instance, Captain Nelson (Larry Hagman) is an astronaut. And even
Disney’s 1961 film remake of the 1903 Victor Herbert operetta Babes in Toyland
now featured a raygun with “molecular discharges.” Quisp cereal, introduced in
1965, featured a space alien as its cartoon mascot, following in the tradition of
thirties and fifties children’s sf advertisement. In 1962, a series of advertisements by
electronics manufacturer Carson-Roberts, Inc. had featured sf stories “written
expressly for the campaign by well-known science-fiction authors” based on the
premise that “the science fiction angle should vastly increase readership of the
ads”—presumably, by adults interested in “advanced electronic equipment” (New
York Times, May 1 1962, 47).

17  
 
 
by formal film genre criticism and film scholarship, it seems clear that the

connections between sf and sixties pop culture are multiple and extend to the

far reaches of North American and European culture: the Apollo missions

should be noted first and foremost, but also evident should be the popular

futurism exemplified by Expo ‘67, the advertising industry’s embrace of

tropes from sf and the “space age,” the still-resonating cultural impact of the

fifties sf film boom, the growing legitimation of sf literature and theory, and

the sf-inflected futurist rhetoric of American cultural “visionaries” as diverse

as Marshall McLuhan, Alvin Toffler, and Timothy Leary. Donal Henahan’s

contemporaneous review of 2001: A Space Odyssey, for instance reveals that

for at least some critics of the era, Kubrick’s film was seen as part of a

general popular body of works that melded avant-gardism, modernism,

futurism, and futurology (1968, D11).

In the sixties, space travel often represented a Utopian attitude toward

progress mirroring the hippie movement. For Fredric Jameson, “the sixties”

itself denotes a “sense of freedom and possibility” which existed objectively as

a function of generated surplus consciousness (1984, 208).15 The

pervasiveness of sf in the era may be used to reflect on this claim. In more

concrete terms of material progress, philosopher Nicholas Rescher points out

                                                                                                               
15 It was also an illusion, he claims, which emerged from the “play” of the
superstructural movement into postmodernism.

18  
 
 
that the general sixties Utopian feeling was escalated by economic and

technological advancement which led to the sense that people were living in a

“high-tech era of nuclear power, space exploration, computerization, and

robotization” (1997, 97-98). Arthur Marwick further elucidates sixteen

cultural “developments” which occurred beginning after 1958-1959 but

ending ca. 1973 which were marked by “a high element of willed human

agency” as well as “economic, technological, or demographic imperatives

[that] were of greatest importance” (2012, 15-18). Sf can therefore be

understood as a venue in which to explore futuristic developments and their

discursive resonances. Reflecting this timeline, Brian Aldiss (2004) notes that

by 1975 sf could no longer indicate the zeitgeist. For instance, “Project Apollo

was mothballed, and the space race was over. With it went a substantial

reason for the existence of science fiction, for which space travel was an

article of faith” (Aldiss 2004, 510).16 This dissertation attempts, therefore, to

broadly locate the sf cinema which seemed to emerge and dissipate along

with the “sixties” moment.

                                                                                                               
16 Aldiss further links a mid-seventies re-orientation in the genre with the renewed
success of The Lord of the Rings novels (2004, 510). Together, these two influences
seem to me significant as a cultural background for the creation of Star Wars.

19  
 
 
Sample of Films

For the purposes of this dissertation, the texts contained under the

broad heading of “sixties sf cinema” will be represented by a diverse sample

of one hundred-fifty films I viewed over a period of approximately two years,

amounting to approximately one-quarter of the total number of sf films

produced in Europe, Japan and the United States during the period 1959-

1971.17 Because I am re-casting sf as a broad cultural frame invoked and

adapted to various modes of production, I have sought a sample of films more

diverse than it is statistically representative. That is, I have included a range

of films from producer/genre and director-centered production ventures large

and small—the total field of commercially exhibited films—but at the

expense of a large number of Italian and Japanese B-productions (as these

countries dominated the genre’s B-production during these years) which in

any case tend toward the most formula standardization and repetition. By no

means will B-productions be ignored. Rather, one of my goals will be to

consider whether generic resonances can be observed across modes of

production.

While it may seem odd to focus the analysis of sf across various

                                                                                                               
17 Even then, if my secondary literature is considered, an even larger number of
films were considered. This is true also of the body of fifties films, of which I viewed
fifty for the purposes of this project and encountered dozens more within primary
and secondary production and reception literature.

20  
 
 
distinct modes of production, and while sf is hardly the only frame within

which many of these films may be considered, all of the films under

consideration nevertheless reveal contemporaneous reception (and usually,

production) histories referencing them as “science fiction” and/or “sci-fi.” It is

for this very reason that the sixties sf films seem ripe for broad aggregate

analysis in order to determine which horizons of meaning these descriptors

entailed.

I may however note a number of more specific blind spots in my

sample. Both spy genre films [e.g., the James Bond franchise] and broadly

comic family films [e.g., The Absent-Minded Professor (1961) and The Nutty

Professor (1963)] are excluded despite their general relevance to the topic of

sixties sf culture, largely because both groups entail substantial corpuses the

principle frameworks for which are only tangential to sf.18

Additionally, the present dissertation will not provide an extended

discussion of sixties sf television. Looking in-depth at television in the

present analysis would greatly enlarge the project’s scope while also altering

the principle dynamics of the present project—that is, the relation between

sixties International film culture and sf and its significance across the West

in various modes of production. It would for instance necessarily bias this

                                                                                                               
18 PlayTime (1967), which may be considered an example of the second type, is
however included due to focus on modernist urbanization.

21  
 
 
project toward American production due to the relatively limited availability

of non-U.S. sf television from this period (with a few notable exceptions

including the surviving episodes of Doctor Who). I have however included two

exceptions to this rule: the BBC telefilms The War Game (1965, which was

shot on film and ultimately shown theatrically rather than broadcast) and

The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968), neither of which are, in any case,

serials.

Exploring sf television in a comprehensive way may further beg the

question of sf literature, theater, comics, and so on. The genre context this

dissertation attempts to provide in the domain of cinema may in the future

inform a broader analysis of sf across sixties media.

Findings and Chapter Outline

Despite the supposed heterogeneity of sixties sf, the films—as well as a

significant number of available primary and secondary reception materials

and the production materials available for On the Beach (1959) and

Fahrenheit 451 (1966)—lead to the conclusion that the diverse period of sf

film production beginning in 1959 (and corresponding with the beginning of a

large “gap” in major Hollywood film production) was indeed a fairly coherent

period marked by critical, intellectual engagement with three overarching

themes of widespread social and cultural significance. These themes, which

22  
 
 
correspond to the three “new” faces of sf literature Raymond Williams

outlined in 1956, are Disaster (“Doomsday”), Dystopia (“Putropia”), and

Exploration (“Space Anthropology”).19 Although these themes also tended to

dominate the fifties sf cycle, the sixties films re-imagined each sub-genre in

ways that deviated significantly from their fifties determinants.20 After

discussing the evolution of these forms in Chapter One, I will provide critical

surveys of each sub-generic type in Chapters Two, Three, and Four.

Throughout, I consider the textual and discursive parameters of each sub-

genre in relation to these overarching sub-generic themes.21

                                                                                                               
19 Although Williams’s context is sf literature (short stories, novellas, and novels), he
is concerned in the broadest possible sense with the contemporaneous utopian and
dystopian discourses seeming to structure (and indicated by) this corpus. His
analysis of sf literature is therefore as much an analysis of the state of the popular
cultural imagination generally as it is a broad review of the literary sub-categories of
the pulp sf field. For this reason, I find it reasonable to use his categories—so borne
out paradigmatically in the sample —as a scaffold for the current project. Indeed,
this approach became an elegant solution to the problem of “grouping” sixties sf
cinema’s major tendencies.
20 I supplemented the research of my primary objects by viewing and reviewing
reception materials and secondary literature on fifty films from the years 1950-1958.

23  
 
 
 Throughout my research, I discovered that sixties sf cinema rarely

seemed to express a naïve form of Utopianism. Rather, sf is often as much

about dystopia and the horrors of science as it is about the hope for progress.

For this reason, sixties sf seems to share with the theorists of the Frankfurt

school a sense of Jewish messianism. Just as the nostalgia of the loss of the

temple always tempers the hope for the messiah, the promise of Utopia is

always tempered by its impossibility, encapsulating the dialectic of

enlightenment and the logos of death-drive.

In Chapter Two, I therefore begin with the era’s nuclear disaster

stories, which focused on the threat of total nuclear annihilation, in prestige

films such as On the Beach (1959), Fail-Safe (1964), and The Bedford Incident

(1965). These films incorporated the social drama and psychological thriller

formulas. European existentialist treatments such as Godard’s Il nuovo

mondo (1962) and Ferreri’s Il seme dell’uomo (1969) meanwhile translated

nuclear disaster into art cinema. I also discuss cases in which the nuclear

                                                                                                               
21 In the present work, I do not therefore pursue extended analysis of individual
films on the isolated aesthetic levels of visual design, score, etc. This is not to say
that these dimensions of analysis are either unimportant or unrelated to the films’
generic horizons. The present work is concerned rather with broad generic
classification on the basis of narrative themes and the relation of these sf themes to
the larger culture. For this reason, I will note the films’ aesthetic tendencies only to
the extent that are overt and/or reveal an overt connection to sixties stylistic
flashpoints (such as Pop art).

24  
 
 
scenario is infused with absurd comedy, including Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove:

or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Lester and

Milligan’s The Bed-Sitting Room (1969), and Corman’s Gas! – Or It Became

Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (also known as Gas-s-s-s,

1970). Finally, I consider these nuclear disaster forms within the context of

Utopian negation.

In Chapter Three, I examine the era’s wide range of future dystopia

stories as articulations of the era’s Huxleyian imagination. Films discussed

include Godard’s Alphaville (1965), Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), George

Lucas’s THX-1138 (1971), Petri’s La decima vittima (1965), and Ferreri’s

Marcia nuzale (The Wedding March, 1965), all of which paint a portrait of a

tragicomic dystopian future, impersonal and anodyne, combining features of

communism and modern bourgeois life. I also note cases in which an

estranged present-day scenario is presented as dystopian, including Jacques

Tati’s PlayTime (1967), Gregoretti’s Omicron (1963), Teshigahara’s Tanin no

kao (1966), and John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966). Finally, I situate the

era’s future dystopian fables that comment on youth counterculture, either as

a force of good or ill, including Work Is a 4-Letter Word (1968), Peter

Watkins’s Privilege (1967), Robert Harris’s Ice (1970), Kubrick’s A Clockwork

Orange (1971), and the infamous Wild in the Streets (1968).

Finally, in Chapter Four, I examine films relating to Williams’s “Space

25  
 
 
Anthropology” and exploration of various sorts. In films including Roger

Vadim’s Barbarella (1968), Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Planet of

the Apes (1968), and Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), the figure of the

astronaut provides an avatar of human progress. Meanwhile, films including

the French time travel stories such as Marker’s La jetée (1962), Resnais’s Je

t’aime Je t’aime (1968), and Robert Benayoun’s Paris n’existe pas (Paris Does

Not Exist, 1969) are more concerned with the traversal of “inner” space. In

2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as Corman’s X, the Man With X-Ray Eyes

(1963) and David Cronenberg’s Stereo (1969), progress is considered within

the frame of human evolution.

26  
 
 
  
Chapter One: The Rise of Sixties SF Cinema

In this chapter, I will present three essential background elements for

the analysis of sixties sf films. In order to isolate the historic moment of

sixties sf, its specific structures and features, its iconography and formulas,

its interpretative horizon, and, broadly, the hermeneutic frame it provides, I

will provide a brief history of sf before ca. 1959—when I claim a change in the

genre’s trajectory became apparent. I will then discuss a few specific changes

that led to the sixties sf cinema’s specificity, including broad cultural and

political transitions and taste-cultural and industrial organizational

realignments in both film and sf. Finally, I will describe the dimensions of

sixties sf cinema the further analysis of which will comprise the subsequent

chapters.

Sf is of course a broad category of cultural, for example literary, forms

with a long history. A precise top-down definition of the genre is difficult, but

one can at least say that contemporary sf is commonly understood as a

particular narrative combination of speculation, “hard” science, and “space

opera,” which can be traced in the U.S. to its dispersal through the magazine

Astounding Science Fiction. Sf historian Edward James claims that although

the term “science fiction” was first used as early as 1929 in this context,

contemporary sf as such did not emerge as a clear genre distinct from either

27  
 
 
Utopian fiction or fantasy-adventure until the late thirties in America, when

Astounding editor John W. Campbell made a self-conscious effort to avoid

outright fantasy (1994, 56).1 In the stories of sf’s “golden age,” wonder was

therefore married with speculation based in scientific possibility.

Brian Aldiss enriches the notion that sf is a hybrid of Utopian scientific

                                                                                                               
1 Sf writer and historian Thomas Disch looks back as far as proto-sf author Edgar
Allen Poe to reveal an earlier example of the scorn that America’s conservative
highbrow critics heaved onto “fantasy”: “though Poe was read by his own
countrymen, he was read grudgingly” (1998, 35). But what is most remarkable about
the criticism of Poe is the way in which its rhetoric seems to remain consistent with
later middle-class attacks on sf. T.S. Eliot, for instance, wrote: “That Poe had a
powerful intellect is undeniable: but it seems to me the intellect of a highly gifted
young person before puberty. The forms which his lively curiosity takes are those in
which a pre-adolescent mentality delights . . . ” (cited in Disch 1998, 35). Of course,
Poe was quite popular among the literari of Britain and Europe. As I read Eliot’s
criticism and imagine the ideal reader with a “pre-adolescent mentality,” I cannot
help but be reminded of the “man child” prevalent in fifties and sixties media
depictions: characters like Jerry Lewis’s Eugene Fullstack from Artists and Models
(1955)—emotionally stunted and obsessed with sci-fi and comics. Indeed, in the
fifties, sci-fi seems to have fit into a whole cultural constellation of maladjusted male
adolescence that represented the cheap magazine’s immediate descendents:
adventure, sf and horror stories in print, on celluloid, in the comics, and on the
television screen. And by the fifties, many of these forms were under attack from the
guardians of American middle-class culture. Comic books most famously came under
the attack of psychologists such as Frederic Wertham, whose Seduction of the
Innocent (1954) spurred a Congressional investigation into the anti-social tendencies
of crime and horror comics, leading to the industry’s self-regulatory Comics Code.

28  
 
 
literature and of Fantasy, or Romance, by claiming that sf literature occupies

a spectrum between the “Wellsian” impulse of productive speculation about

the real world (based on reasoned reflection upon existing and possible

science) and the “Edgar Rice Burroughsian” impulse of speculation about

some daydream world (based on fantasy extrapolation of a flight of fancy).

These two impulses represent the “thinking” and “dreaming” poles of the

genre (Aldiss 1974, 9). In cinema, one can see equivalent proto-sf cinema of

both Utopian and space fantasy types. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Die

Frau im Mond (The Woman in the Moon, 1929) and the British Things to

Come (1936) are prototypical of the “thinking pole,” while the

cosmic/futuristic serials such as Universal’s Flash Gordon (1936) and Buck

Rogers (1939) represent the genre’s “dreaming pole.”

For many scholars (including Richard Hodgens, Vivian Sobchack,

Bradley Shauer, and others), genuine sf cinema did not however emerge until

1950, when the release of Destination Moon bolstered the popularization of

the concept of a “science-fiction film.” And indeed, Destination Moon (based

on a story by pulp sf writer Robert Heinlein) balances these generic

tendencies in the manner of a travel documentary, continually shifting

attention between scientific details of a trip to the moon and marveling at the

29  
 
 
feat.2

A nascent prestige sense of sf parallels the appearance of sf cinema as

the literary genre saw a general rise in popularity and US middle-class

acceptance between 1940-1960 marked by the growth of a market for

paperbacks by authors including Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury.3 During

this period, leading respected mainstream authors around the world,

including Vladimir Nabokov, Kingsley Amis, Kobo Abe, and Italo Calvino,

also began to praise and adapt the genre to their own work.

                                                                                                               
2 This combination of didacticism and visualization provides a link between sf and
documentary. Steven Spielberg memorably evokes this tendency in Jurassic Park
(1993) when an animated film is used to describe the novum.
3 Nevertheless, even in 1960 the reticence to embrace sf as a legitimate cultural form
is evident, for instance, in Robert Plank’s article “Science Fiction,” published in The
American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. Plank, a clinical social worker at the Mental
Hygiene Clinic of the Cleveland, Ohio, Veterans Administration, is a great fan of the
socially reflective powers of Utopian literature and some “high-brow science-fiction”
but remains skeptical of the genre. Although “we know that there is highbrow,
middlebrow, and lowbrow science fiction,” Planks writes, “we do not know what
weight to assign to each, and we do not know to what extent we can assume that
changes in style pioneered by leading magazines will filter through to the rest of the
field” (1960, 804). Plank maintains that the sf is often marked by an “oddity” that
attracts psychiatric patients (1960, 799).

30  
 
 
Cinematic SF in Transformation

As is often noted, the fifties sf films, almost exclusively B-movies, were

often seen to represent the worst tendencies of the genre. They often raised

the ire of critics and audiences, who soon grew tired of their predictable

formulas. After Rocketship X-M (1950) and Destination Moon established the

space exploration formula, Hollywood adapted notable sf stories, many of

which cemented additional narrative types. Twentieth Century-Fox’s The

Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) (based on 1940’s “Farewell to the Master” by

Harry Bates), Paramount’s War of the Worlds (1953) (based on the proto-pulp

novel by H.G. Wells), Universal-International’s It Came from Outer Space

(1953), and RKO’s The Thing from Another World (1951) (based on John W.

Campbell’s 1938 Astounding story “Who Goes There?”) established a trend of

alien visitation stories. Warner Bros.’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1952)

(based on Ray Bradbury’s 1951 “The Fog Horn”) and Them (1954), with its

massive mutant ants, created a predictable atomic monster formula, which

was soon adapted internationally by, for instance, Gojira (Godzilla, 1954).

Though they adapted stories from the sf landscape, these films existed in the

proto-sf category of the “weirdie,” an industry term Thomas Doherty claims

denoted “offbeat” tales based in something bizarre and ominous: a monster,

an alien, an affliction, a mutation, invading into the modern American world

31  
 
 
(2002, 119).4

Even the U.S. critics who admired sf literature rejected the Hollywood

sf weirdies due to the perception that they were anti-scientific in emphasis

and too rigidly followed exploitation formulas. For instance, in the 1959 essay

“A Brief, Tragical History of the Science Fiction Film,” Hodgens claimed that

sf in the cinema was stuck in a low-brow pulp stage of evolution and was

unable to advance because of the visual and narrative limitations provided in

its cinematic form (1959, 37). A notable comparison between literary and

cinematic appraisals of sf can be drawn between Campbell’s story “Who Goes

There” and its adaptation as RKO’s The Thing from Another World.

Concerning the source story, James writes:

The plot was relatively standard pulp, but the

treatment was not. Apart from the fact that the
author provided a grittily realistic setting, with a
highly effective sense of tension and suspense, the
crux of the story was the premise which was to fuel
more modern sf: that the laws of science are
universal, and that problems can be solved by using

                                                                                                               
4 It is possible that Doherty overemphasizes the industry usage of the term “weirdie”
as I have been unable to find consistent use of the term in the industry press (as
opposed to, for instance, “sci-fi.”) and most subsequent sources using the term cite
Doherty. However, I will continue to use the term for the sake of expedience as it is a
remarkably useful category for discussing the overlapping use of “uncanny”
conventions in horror, sf, thrillers, and melodramas in the post-war years.

32  
 
 
 the logic of science. (1994, 50)

Hodgens cites The Thing from Another World, by contrast, as a prime

example of the ways in which film adaptation mangled sf. Whereas the

horrific creature of the story was presented as a true enigma, the film

inserted the pat and fashionable explanation of a flying saucer. The creature

itself became merely a combination of Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster,

“reduced to this strange combination of familiar elements in the belief that

the original idea—the idea which made the story make sense—was too

complex” (Hodgens 1959, 34). Furthermore, “the most stupid character in the

film is the most important scientist . . . And the film ended with a warning to

all mankind: ‘Watch the skies’ for these abominably dangerous Flying

Saucers” (Hodgens 1959, 34). In other words, it seemed as though both the

iconographical and formula expectations of horror replaced the intelligent

speculation and hard science that characterized the earlier story. Reflecting

this position, Joan Dean claims the goal of the extraterrestrial cycle of the

fifties is “the creation of fear, pity, horror, suspense or awe in the audience”

rather than intellectual engagement (1979, 33).5

Doherty (2002) explains that fifties sf films are weirdies first, and sf

second, as many of the films of the fifties sf cycle had indeed been concocted

                                                                                                               
5 The Nation critic Robert Hatch especially lauded 2001 for straying from
melodrama, which he called “the natural habitat of science fiction” (1968, 74).

33  
 
 
as part of a larger strategy to corner the teenage (and pre-teen) horror

exploitation film market. Doherty claims that as teenagers became the

largest film audience, producers provided them with the rock n’ roll cycle, the

juvenile delinquent cycle, and fifties horror and sf cycle. After all, as sf had

been established as a popular genre in pulp magazines, comics, radio, and

serials over the preceding decades, it was a natural choice for cinematic

adaptation—especially to compete with television, which had begun adapting

sf as early as the forties.

By the middle of the fifties, however, the sf weirdie had seemed to have

already exhausted its plot possibilities, and producers, critics, and audiences

began to sour on the increasingly prolific genre. In a later, historical

evaluation, Douglas Menville would claim that “the year 1956 produced

quantity but little quality in the way of science-fiction,” and this criticism

bears out in contemporaneous reviews and articles in Variety, which had

become increasingly hostile to sf—although this hostility is evident earlier,

based for instance on the scathing reviews received by the juvenile robot film

Tobor the Great (1954) (1975, 119). By 1957, the apparently frivolous field

was entitled “sci-fi”—a new disparaging term of fad-commodification. The

minor studios and independents had come to dominate the genre by quickly

producing and exploiting bad, inexpensive sci-fi pictures, leaving the majors

scrambling to develop bigger and better sf films but afraid that they could not

34  
 
 
compete with the independents at their own game. By the autumn of 1958,

both the majors and the independents had begun to slow their production

(McCann 1977, 38).6

In keeping with an industry-wide trend toward “frank” pictures

dealing with “adult subjects,” exploitation producers were moving from the

fifties teenpic genres into the territory laid out by Hollywood’s Tennessee

Williams adaptations. In November of 1958, for instance, the small Nacirema

studio announced a switch from “horror-sci-fi-teenage” films to “controversial,

problem films” as the former was “drying up” (Daily Variety November 6,

1958, 6). As the industry changed, Universal executive Jack H. Harris

claimed to “[see] a dim future for sci-fi pix” (Variety December 4, 1958, 1).

But sf would soon be revitalized as a new form of prestige sf product

emerged. George Pal’s contract with Columbia was ended only to find the

director hired by MGM. Whereas Pal’s MGM project The Time Machine

(1960) would continue to embody the traditional Hollywood visual

                                                                                                               
6 United Artists reported that it would end production of sf, citing “disgust” with the
standards of the genre (Daily Variety August 6, 1958, 1). Even AIP, for whom sf
films directed by Roger Corman [such as Not of This World (1957)] had become
highly lucrative, began having problems, assuring exhibitors that they would be
providing more “planning, production values, and novelty” in their future products
(Daily Variety September 8, 1958, 6).

35  
 
 
presentation of quality,7 both On the Beach (1959) and the less-successful

nuclear disaster film The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959) are deep-

focus black and white social-problem pictures.8 Here, I do not wish to claim

that these were the first films to take these stylistic or thematic directions.

Rather, a few years earlier, films such as Jack Arnold’s The Incredible

Shrinking Man (1957) and Walter Wanger’s production of Don Siegel’s

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) had each attempted to enrich the

earlier tradition of the so-called “weirdies” with introspective and hard-

hitting screenplays, but these works were not successfully differentiated as

prestige or adult films by Hollywood or the critics. Invasion of the Body

Snatchers, considered in retrospect a classic, arrived in 1956 with little

fanfare and almost no press. At that time, only the earlier prestige mode of
                                                                                                               
7 This occasioned an interview in Variety:
Admitting there seems to be no particular decrease in the
smaller sci-fi pic, producer said there probably always would be
a public for this type, since many want to be among the first
day’s audience to catch these films. However, he pointed out,
these generally play out after only mediocre returns with the
heavy grosses accruing to those pix which have been made with
sincere intention, rather than with the pitch merely for a fast
buck. Pal likened the sci-fi classification to the western: Both
must be made as important features if they are to enjoy heavy
public reaction. (Daily Variety January 1, 1959, 10)
8 The differences between the two are indicative of the distinction between the “two
forms of prestige” described by Chris Cagle (2007).

36  
 
 
color spectacle was understood as acceptable for a prestige sf mode and was

vigorously pursued with Forbidden Planet. But On the Beach provided the

expectations for future “adult sci-fi” (Daily Variety March 17, 1959, 2) [as did

The Twilight Zone (1959)].

Ironically, several elements of the earlier fifties films would prove

significant for this new type of socially relevant prestige product. After all, it

was the fifties sf films that first capitalized on plots ripped from the

headlines and the pages of Popular Science—taking advantage of a vogue for

science and following from a narrative-standard established by the first film

of the cycle, The Flying Saucer (1950). This led to the generic association of sf

with the present rather than the fantastic extreme future scenarios of the

previous Utopian and space fantasy films.9

A second, and related, reason is that a few Hollywood filmmakers had

pioneered the use of the introspective, complex story as a variation on the

social problem picture, to produce films that “meant something.” Peter

                                                                                                               
9 A “realistic” black and white look was also pioneered by the fifties cycle. Critic
Moira Walsh of America opines that Them “furnishes the basis for the best science-
fiction film since The Thing. The reason is simply that everything about the picture
except its premise is perfectly logical and normal. Its cast goes about the fearsome
task of destroying the ants in absorbingly detailed semi-documentary style” (1954,
367). Likewise, the Newsweek review notes that “its clear, realistic photography is in
prosaic black and white; its characters have an everyday credibility. And so the way
is prepared to make its ghastly developments more or less believable (Newsweek
June 7, 1954, 56).

37  
 
 
Biskind for instance characterizes The Day the Earth Stood Still and It Came

from Outer Space, both of which featured alien messengers urging pacifism,

as examples of Hollywood “left-wing” sf, “imagin[ing] a Utopian alternative to

the [ideological] center,”10 and indeed, director Robert Wise claims that he

chose The Day the Earth Stood Still project due to its strong anti-war

message (1985, 157).11

However, it was not until near the end of the fifties that American sf

was truly combined with the style and formulae of the liberal social problem

picture, and this trend began not in film but on television with Rod Serling’s

“The Time Element” (1958), which used the novum of time-travel to address

the problem of psychological trauma incurred by decades of modern warfare.

In this hour-long story for Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, a man, played by

William Bendix, visits a psychiatrist, played by Martin Balsam, claiming that

his recurring nightmare of the invasion of Pearl Harbor is too realistic to be a

dream, and therefore he must be going back in time. The analogical quality of
                                                                                                               
10 It Came from Outer Space producer William Alland, who called the film “the most
political I ever got” (Buhle and Wagner 2003, 78), had been a member of the
Communist Party “intermittently from the late 1930s to the late 1940s” (Buhle and
Wagner 2003, 78).
11 At least, according to the director’s recent recollections, captured in the
interview/commentary on the currently available DVD. Mark Jancovich goes even
further, claiming that as a body sf films of the fifties can be viewed as “critical texts”
(1996, 30).

38  
 
 
this narrative framework simply bubbles over with implications. Contrasting

romanticized tableaux of pre-WWII Hawaii with a stark urban present, “The

Time Element” insinuates that the seventeen-year period since the war

represents a collective nightmare. Subtle and overt references to Cold War

anxiety abound.

The Twilight Zone followed “The Time Element,” compressing its

theme and others in a new novum of the week. Gerald Duchovnay (2008)

points out the subtle subversion of such a strategy: Serling turned to fantasy

and sf only after being criticized for social realist plays such as Patterns

(1953), for which he was labeled a “communist.” The turn to sf can therefore

be seen as a strategy for indirectly articulating critical content, shielded by

the genre’s ostensible claims to innocuous entertainment, as well as the

ambiguous form of analogy the genre provides.12

Following On the Beach and The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, the

films Fail-Safe (1964), Seven Days in May (1964), Dr. Strangelove: or How I

Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), and The Bedford

                                                                                                               
12 Similarly, M. Keith Booker (2001) claims that the Golden Age of sf fiction can be
seen as forming a part of this trend of socialist futurology although popular U.S.
leftism became increasingly veiled in Red Scare-era America. Nevertheless, works
such as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series can be analyzed as Marxist parables.
However, Booker reminds his readers, “If Asimov, Pohl, Vonnegut and Barzman
leaned heavily to the Left, it is also the case that major figures such as Ray
Bradbury, and especially, Heinlein leaned to the right” (2001, 48).

39  
 
 
Incident (1965), all noted by Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner as examples

of Hollywood’s “creeping leftism,” retain a speculative frame and treat the

technology leading to destruction as a novum (1988, 3). Of course, at this time

the historical convergence between “mere” speculation and scientific actuality

was no doubt responsible for a continually rising interest in sf, which surely

began to look more like future history. With the Cold War developments of

Sputnik and mutually assured-destruction, once purely fantasy scenarios

seemed not only possible, but all too probable. After the Cuban missile crisis,

such parallels would no doubt seem only clearer. And so the possibilities for

sf continued to expand as its iconography and formulas came to represent a

genre of potential social criticism.

Outside of the United States sf was also becoming established as a

medium of the avant-garde.13 Aldiss for instance notes that for decades “well-

known [British and European] authors occasionally wrote futuristic or satiric

or surreal tales that could be construed as science fiction” (2004, 510). By the

sixties, French theorist Michel Carroughes positions sf within a constellation

of “anticipatory literature [literature d’anticipation], a genre which includes

                                                                                                               
13 The discursive relationship between sf and high modernist practice can be noted
at several points in the sixties even in the United States. In 1964, Variety’s theater
reviews labeled a stage version of The Martian Chronicles “a kind of sci-fi Harold
Pinter or Samuel Beckett” (Daily Variety October 16, 1964, 6). Indeed, Beckett’s own
The Lost Ones (1966) is sometimes interpreted as sf (Dowd 2007, 125; Poruch 1986,
87-98).

40  
 
 
sf as well as Utopian fiction, surrealist poetry and the writings of such

authors as Raymond Roussel and J.L. Borges,” while sf writer and theorist

Jacques Sternberg, who wrote the scenario for Alain Resnais’s 1968 time-

travel film Je t’aime Je t’aime is able to present sf as the heir “of [Alfred]

Jarry’s ‘Pataphysics’ and of Surrealism” (Fitting 1974, 173-176).14

In Italy, so-called fantascienza became an alternative for writers and

filmmakers who wished to retain their focus on social parables while

branching out from the established style of neo-realism (Marwick 2012,

149).15

Emerging amid the meteoric rise of European art cinema, the

increasing vogue for sf in Great Britain, France, and Italy created the

                                                                                                               
14 Michael Ashley notes that when magazine sf began to appear in Japan in the
fifties the form was understood “as a sideline of surrealism and was thus highly
regarded” (2005, 318). The relationship between surrealism and sf (especially those
sf stories of an explicitly critical variety) can be traced back as early as the 1917
roots of surrealism as surnaturalism in the writings of Guillaume Apollinaire.
Apollinaire claims a constructed reality of “superior naturalism” as paradoxically
closer to reality than traditions founded upon principles of realism. Apollinaire
claimed that the “truth” of nature could be more easily found in non-mimetic
representations that utilized the form of allegory or fable (Fer, Batchelor and Wood
1993, 63; see also Bohn (1977).
15 Italo Calvino’s Le Cosmicomiche (1965) is perhaps the most prominent example.

41  
 
 
conditions for a cycle of “art house” sf production in Europe, represented by

the foundation of the Trieste Science Fiction Film Festival in 1963. By

December of 1964, Jean-Luc Godard decided to make Alphaville and eight

months later it won both the Berlin Film Festival and the third Trieste

Science Fiction Festival, revealing a critical willingness to accept sf—art

cinema productions as exemplars of both categories.16 By the end of the

decade, dozens of additional sf art films would be produced. Like the

emerging Hollywood prestige films, sf art films would reflect the three sub-

generic sf types Raymond Williams detected: nuclear disaster, dystopia, and

exploration.

                                                                                                               
16 The British The Mind Benders (1963), which won the grand prize, was reviewed
not only as “a sharp contrast to the ‘mass market’ product usually associated with
American International” but even as “a novel and adult approach to sci-fi that
makes the film more suitable as an art house candidate than for general release”
(Daily Variety March 1, 1963, 3). Second Annual Trieste winner The Damned (1964)
was also lauded for its artistry and creativity (Weekly Variety July 29, 1964, 5). In
September 1963, a report appeared that Samuel Bronston Productions has
purchased the rights to Brave New World “originally considered a hi-brow sci-fi
fiction work, ‘World’ has since become a literary classic” (Daily Variety September 3,
1963, 2). By 1968, 2001 would be mentioned alongside such other high-brow sf
products as Alphaville, Fahrenheit 451, Michael Cocoyannis’s The Day the Fish
Came Out (1967), Alain Resnais’s Je t’aime Je t’aime, Ingmar Bergman’s Skammen
(Shame, 1968), and Peter Hall’s Work Is a 4-Letter Word (1968) (New York Times
November 19 1967, 137).

42  
 
 
Three Interlocking Discourses: Disaster, Dystopia, and Exploration

If the thirties had been the golden age of Utopian sf futures on the

screen from the grand modern technology-driven social experiments of Things

to Come (1936) to the seemingly endless miraculous technological solutions of

the Flash Gordon (1936) serial, the fifties turned decisively to disaster and

dystopian scenarios. In this era, the mythic spectacles of Biblical wrath, going

back to the hubris of Moloch’s worshippers in Metropolis (1927), reached an

apogee in film in the alien invasion and planetary disaster cycles. In his

study of the fifties sf cultural context, Adam Knee has argued that the fifties

Hollywood films “narratively exemplify [the era’s] ‘containment culture’" in

their preoccupation with trying to observe and clarify borders of various

kinds—conceptualized in gendered and racial terms” (1997, 20). In keeping

with this claim, space anthropology films concerned aliens who provided

profound others, and dystopia in fifties sf is most frequently explored through

human protagonists’ encounters with crumbling alien civilizations.17 Often,

these alien societies, through the rule of intelligence and with the help of

unemotional robots, were thinly veiled figures of Soviet communism whose

“central planning” bore the rhetorical brunt of the criticism of science gone
                                                                                                               
17 These were frequently on the planet Mars, based on a long history of cultural
mythology.

43  
 
 
“too far.” The apparent centrism of these uses of disaster, dystopia, and

exploration may be contrasted with the uses of the same sub-genres in the

years following ca. 1958.

1957 had seen the launches of both Sputnik and the first

Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and therefore demarcated a new stage in

the Cold War as well as the popular speculative imagination,18 ignited by the

fears of the Eisenhower-era policy of “massive retaliation” and the increasing

potential for “Mutually Assured Destruction.” A prominent wave of post-

atomic-apocalypse novels appeared, including Nevil Shute’s On the Beach

(1957), Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959), Mordecai Roschwald’s Level 7

(1959), and Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowiz (1959), further spurring

this imagination. The films that arrived beginning with On the Beach (1959)

benefitted from this increased politicization as well as some members of the

film industry’s tendencies toward bucking censorship and promoting openly

                                                                                                               
18 Doherty notes that 43 new space films were put into production as a result of
Sputnik’s launch (Doherty 2002, 43).

44  
 
 
left-leaning Hollywood projects.19

Unlike the second cycle of post-apocalyptic nuclear destruction films

that emerged in the eighties (a series of action-adventure melodramas of

“survival” based in part on popular Reagan-era information campaigns about

a post-blast “nuclear winter”), the majority of these sixties films tapped into

the era’s progressive political attitudes, as well as the softening of the sci-fi

formula in favor of a field benefitting from the decade’s cross-fertilization of

prestige, exploitation, experimental, and art cinema. The films that emerged

were often critical (and even philosophical) in tone and deliberately

provocative. A screen-filling mushroom cloud punctuates many a finale,

including those of The Bedford Incident (1965) and Dr. Strangelove: or How I

Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). In Kazui Nihonmatsu’s

nihilistic Konchû daisensô (Genocide, 1968) for Shôchiku, a drug-addicted

American airman (Chico Roland) experiences a horrific military flashback

and crashes a bomber harboring a nuclear weapon. When the American

                                                                                                               
19 Stanley Kramer, the left-leaning director-producer of On the Beach, had been
instrumental in the re-integration of blacklistees back into the Hollywood
mainstream. After casting “guilty bystander” Marsha Hunt in The Happy Time
(1952) (McGilligan and Buhle 1997, 307), he knowingly hired blacklistee Nedrick
Young to co-script The Defiant Ones (1958) and Inherit the Wind (1960) (albeit under
the pseudonym “Nathan Douglas”). Peter Buhle and Dave Wagner speculate that
Young may have also provided uncredited contributions to the screenplay for On the
Beach (2003, 156).

45  
 
 
government discovers the mishap, they decide to detonate the bomb over

Japan rather than allow it to get into enemy hands or reveal their blunder.

The film is thereby bookended by mushroom clouds—the first a common

convention of the genre going back to the first fifties sf films, representing the

“atomic age,” the second finishing the job the first started (mirroring the dual

1945 attacks) [Fig. 1.1]. According to many of the era’s tales of total or near-

total atomic annihilation stoked by the American-Soviet nuclear arms race,

including Planet of the Apes (1968), the French La jetée (1962), and the

Italian Ecce Homo (1968), there can be no rebuilding after World War III. In

these films, modern civilization, even perhaps life on Earth, is made

untenable.

While the sixties contained a few notable Utopian visions of the future,

especially in Star Trek (1966-1969), which sees humanity establishing an

intergalactic federation based in the principles of liberal social democracy

and international diplomacy,20 pessimistic future scenarios greatly

outnumbered such visions. If the nuclear disaster films tended to use the

bomb as evidence of the social interpenetration of irrationality, then the

                                                                                                               
20 If Barbarella (1968) provides a later, slight return to the serials’ marvelous flights
of fancy, it resonates as much as a high camp burlesque on the very notion of a
Utopian future, even evoking the comic “planet of women” motif of films from the
thirties through the sixties by intermingling avatars of male adolescent wish-
fulfillment.

46  
 
 
dystopian films turned to the dangers represented by scientific rationality

itself. That is to say, unlike the nuclear scenarios, which isolate in the bomb

the contradictions of modernity, these tragicomic dystopian fables, including

Fahrenheit 451 (1966), A Clockwork Orange (1971), THX-1138 (1971), and

other variations—the dystopian being the most prolific and internally

coherent sub-genre of the era— describe a future society that manages to

survive without recourse to nuclear war (or manages to survive or regroup

from such a war in the same highly ordered, technological manner as before),

and yet remain bleakly oppressing. The crucial distinction between the

sixties dystopias and nuclear disasters, therefore, is that the banality of

experience in dystopia is conspicuously unhinged from the melodrama of

destruction epitomized by the final, mad, “too late” horror of the bomb—as

though the two are equal and opposite reflections of a world gone wrong.

Often, there is no bomb, so that the dystopia asks us to interrogate our

understanding of progress and see the potential horrors even in the world

gone “right.”

Williams contrasts “Doomsday” and “Putropia” (dystopia), which he

also associates with conservatism and anti-intellectualism, with “Space

Anthropology” stories. “Here,” he writes, “for once among the limitless claims

of sf we find a work of genuine imagination, and real intelligence” (1988,

360). However, the fifties space anthropology films as a rule provide further

47  
 
 
disappointment in this regard, the depiction of The Thing from Another

World (1951) being a case in point. The fifties astronaut films predominately

concern white males and thereby provided the fodder for a consideration (and

potential inversion) of hegemonic sexual and racial assumptions, and it is not

uncommon for these films to represent naturalized gender contrasts as the

major source of narrative fascination. In the sixties, however, the “alien”

increasingly became less a metaphor for that which lay purposely “outside”

but as a limit to be crossed. Likewise, the bending of sexual mores became a

frequent structuring metaphor for journeys of exploration and expanding

paradigms. In these years of social strife (the Cannes Film Festival’s opening

screening of Je t’aime je t’aime, along with the entire festival, would be

cancelled due to the Mai 68 protests), the exploration of human limits would

be increasingly allegorized through liberatory discourses circling around

themes of race, gender, sexuality and “consciousness expansion.”

In the sf cinema of the sixties, therefore, science and the nature of

progress are re-interpreted from a politically engaged critical framework.

Notably, this process proceeds somewhat sequentially. The nuclear disaster

films are most prominent in the years 1959-1964, while art cinematic

dystopias predominate by the mid-decade, and art cinematic exploration

stories proliferate more and more by the decade’s end. In this way, the

confrontation with progress begins with the bomb itself, is followed by a

48  
 
 
consideration of the bomb-producing society as a whole, and is finally

directed toward the exploratory pursuit of a technologically and conceptually

enabled alternative.

Fig. 1.1: Konchû daisensô (1968) begins and ends with a mushroom cloud, the first
actual and the second imagined.

49  
 
 
Chapter Two: Disaster

The Editors of Figaro, December 1959:

On the Beach might easily be taken for an

anticipation film (science-fiction). You know what
this word connotes: a product of the imagination
which scientific progress has made plausible before
the fact. Long ago, back in the days of Wells, one
could tell, in these works, the share of fiction.
Nowadays, we wake up each morning to find
ourselves facing what, only last night, still
belonged to the realm of imagination. Moreover, the
authors of On the Beach do their anticipating only
in terms of elements furnished to them by the
present. The film, in the final analysis, is therefore
less one of anticipation than of prediction, or better,
of warning. (Dec. 3, 17)

The Port Huron Statement:

Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the

last generation in the experiment with living.
(Hayden 2008, 38)

Peter Watkins’s British The War Game (1965), which won the 1966

Academy Award for Best Documentary, displays in documentary fashion the

impact of a nuclear attack on Britain modeled on actual newsreel footage of

50  
 
 
the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of Dresden.

First, the futility of preparation is revealed, with ordinary people often ill-

informed or forced to make do with half-measures due to financial barriers.

Then the horrible consequences are put on display, with mass death,

radiation burns, and radiation sickness depicted in graphic detail [Fig. 2.1].

Although The War Game was a remarkable, unique film directed in the

striking, vérité-inspired style Watkins pioneered with Culloden (1964), The

War Game also participated in the broader trend toward realism in the era’s

new disaster films, inaugurated six years earlier by the film adaptation of On

the Beach (1959).

In the previous chapter, I described the rise of a new breed of prestige

and art sf films, emerging from within a late fifties/early sixties cultural

context defined by formal experimentation and a renewed focus on

progressive subject matter. Films such as Fail-Safe (1964), Seven Days in

May (1964), Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the

Bomb (1964), and The Bedford Incident (1965) all have a history of reception

as prominent progressive post-Cuban Missile Crisis social problem pictures

but are not often considered within the context of the sf genre. In this

chapter, I will consider the formal narrative characteristics utilized in the

creation of a body of films treating nuclear scenarios as nova largely inspired

by speculations concerning an impending atomic “World War III.”

51  
 
 
Fig. 2.1: The War Game (1965) depicts victims of a nuclear catastrophe that strikes
Great Britain.

After presenting a prominent social realist type, in which disaster was

presented in the form of a dramatic realism combining features of social and

psychological realism, I will describe a range of art cinematic treatments in

which the nuclear disaster scenario was also presented as a modernist form

of stylized melodrama and as an occasion for ironic absurdity. Genre and

narrative mode were mutually reinforcing, with sf scenarios focused on

theoretically plausible disaster scenarios providing a prescient form for

52  
 
 
narrative analogy in both realistic and aesthetically stylized modes.

If contemporaneous critical appraisal of many of these films was

positive, at the time producers and critics often downplayed their

relationship to sf, a cinematic genre that was widely considered aesthetically

debased and politically retrograde.1 Susan Sontag’s “The Imagination of

                                                                                                               
1 These films were frequently described as “political films,” which is not to say sf did
not remain a pervasive alternative context. Bosley Crowther for instance reviews Dr.
Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb in the New York
Times as a “very adroit and horrendous politico-science-fiction burlesque” (1964, X1)
with Fail-Safe also “in the science-fiction realm” (1964a, 36), and Vogue reviewer
Henry Geldzahler furthermore labels Fail-Safe “cheap…science-fiction” (1964, 100)
[italics mine]. Nevertheless, the vicissitudes of the sf designation are further tied up
with the larger context of Cold War rhetoric. While “political,” these films’ ostensibly
fantastic (and often, overtly satirical) approaches would provide the basis for
plausible deniability on the charge of genuine subversion. In doing so, however, they
opened the door for official rebuttal on the basis of self-evident incredulity. During a
congressional hearing concerning On the Beach, for instance, Utah Republican
senator Wallace F. Bennett claimed “it is important that those who see it should
accept it for what it is—an imaginative piece of science fiction, a fantasy, and not a
dramatization of what would probably happen in the event of nuclear war”
(Congressional record of the Senate, January 11, 1959, Stanley Kramer Papers Box
24). As the production of such films continued, Washington (and the defense
department, in particular) would become increasingly hostile. In 1964, former
deputy defense secretary and soon-to-be Chairman of the Task Force on Nuclear
Proliferation Roswell Gilpatric would publish an editorial in the New York Times
claiming that such speculative scenarios as Seven Days in May and Dr. Strangelove:
or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb were “not likey” and that
“there should be no concern on behalf of the American people” (1964, SM15).

53  
 
 
Disaster” is in this regard representative of the prevailing critical attitude

toward sf disaster films, which were viewed as both anti-realistic and

ideologically conservative. Sontag describes the disaster’s prominent

spectacle formula (“in Technicolor and on a wide screen”) as a passion play of

grand set-pieces including “the arrival of the thing”; the declaration of “a

national emergency”; “massive counterattacks . . . with brilliant displays of

rocketry, rays, and other advanced weapons [which] are all unsuccessful”;

and, finally, an “ultimate weapon” that vanquishes “the monster or invaders”

once and for all (1965, 43). For Sontag, the “erotics” of this form is linked

intrinsically to the eventual cathartic overcoming of the deadly threat,

anticipating Frederic Jameson’s analysis of Jaws (1975) as a “socially

symbolic” centrist “allegory of alliance” between powerful social forces of

control (1979, 144), with the genre’s “last-minute happy endings” necessarily

seeming to divert any truly radical critique (Sontag 1965, 44.). The disaster

films of the period therefore “reflect worldwide anxieties, and . . . allay

them”(Sontag 1965, 44).2

Although such an analysis can certainly be supported from films such

as When Worlds Collide (1951), Them (1954), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers

(1956), and even the “progressive” The Day the Earth Stood Still (1950), in

the late fifties the Hollywood sf disaster genre evolved beyond the confines of

                                                                                                               
2 Italics mine.

54  
 
 
this earlier, pulpier iteration of the genre into a form which frequently

eschewed or re-interpreted these spectacular set-pieces.3 Thereby, I argue,

the spectacular disaster formulas Sontag describes progressively found

assuredly anti-nuclear “answer films” in the very period she was writing. And

as the bomb is increasingly allowed to play itself, several of Sontag’s claims—

that contemporary films feature “extreme moral simplification”; that all these

films do is “exorcise” trauma; that “we are rarely inside anyone’s feelings”;

and that they contain “absolutely no social criticism, of even the most implicit

kind” (1965, 45-48)—speak therefore not to the contemporary sixties form of

sf disaster but to an idealized low cult-object version of the genre.

I do not want to downplay the role of the bomb in Sontag’s

presentation of the genre, as it looms over her analysis:

                                                                                                               
3 The abundant Japanese disaster films of the late fifties and early sixties remain
spectacles of destruction but contain clear anti-American, anti-military, and anti-
capitalist sentiments as well. Mark Siegel has claimed that these films embody the
complex Japanese reaction to World War II, which would “neither accept total guilt
for the war, nor help but feel shame for losing it” (1985, 255). One may at least note
that in Ishirô Honda’s Chikyu Boeigun (The Mysterians, 1957), the invading aliens
demanding control of Japanese territory are thinly veiled American colonizers, and
in his Mosura (Mothra, 1961) a Western entrepreneur’s greed is to blame for the
moth monster’s retaliatory attack. Mothra is however a beneficent creature,
associated with Christianity (its symbol is the cross), leading Chon Noriega to argue
that the monsters and their battles represent an ongoing dialectical reconciliation of
the post-war Japanese and American cultures from a Japanese perspective (1987,
70-71).

55  
 
 
 . . . the trauma suffered by everyone in the middle
of the 20th century when it became clear that from
now on to the end of human history, every person
would spend his individual life not only under the
threat of individual death, which is certain, but of
something almost unsupportable psychologically—
collective incineration and extinction which could
come any time, virtually without warning. (1965,
48)

However, whereas Sontag delineates a conflicted sf presentation of this

trauma, I would like to appreciate the ways in which the atomic disaster

films progressively addressed these themes after On the Beach. These films

together describe a loss of faith in the ability of modern society to free itself of

increasingly horrific forces of domination and express the unwillingness to

trust that things “get worse before they get better.” Translated into a

Frankfurt School critical-theory perspective, the bomb comes to encapsulate

the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s

Marxist articulation of the double-edged impact of human progress since the

Enlightenment: the machinery of capitalism, which produced greater wealth

and impoverishment than were previously possible, to the modern state,

which simultaneously provided the heights of Western philosophical,

scientific, artistic, and social achievement and the previously unimaginable

56  
 
 
horrors of fascism, Stalinism, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. As Adorno writes,

“No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is

one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb” (1973, 320). In the

iconic short-range V-2 rocket is the Nazi weapon of the London Blitz as well

as the basis both for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and twentieth-

century’s initial conquest of space.4 The atomic disaster films of the sixties

suggest that the tremendous achievement of reason and progress also contain

the key to their own apparent dissolution. Although social alienation had

been central to the era’s modern dystopian films (to be addressed in Chapter

3), these disaster films also highlight the “depersonalizing conditions of

modern urban society” (Sontag 1965, 42), a theme as old as both the sf genre

and the cinematic medium. The key tendency of the atomic films is thus to

reveal these fears as two sides of the same coin, inseparable and mutually

                                                                                                               
4 Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), which occupies an ambiguous
position between the historical novel, postmodernist formal experimentation, and
literary sf, prominently explores the overdetermination of the V-2 bomb. See Leo
Bersani (1989) for a discussion of paranoia and Gravity’s Rainbow.

57  
 
 
reinforcing—together representing the “dark side” of progress.5

The Social Problem Melodrama

On the Beach (1959) depicts a catastrophe of worldwide death by

radiation poisoning. Whereas the scientific scenarios of increasingly rare

spectacular disaster scenarios of the era offended common sense, this new

wave of social problem disasters often took the form of social melodramas,

defined by a strong emphasis on character psychology, social awareness and

scientific plausibility as well as verisimilitude in the domain of mise-en-scène

(in contrast to The War Game (1965)’s approach, which was more reflexive

and estranged). If The War Game, meticulously researched by the BBC, was a

                                                                                                               
5 Paranoia (especially concerning Communist infiltration) has been a prevailing
rhetorical framework for addressing fifties sf invasion and monster films, as not only
the apparent theme of such films as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) but also
as the premise of these films’ critique, which has frequently centered on the
symptomatic “sniffing out” of a coded paranoid message embedded within a paranoid
text. To this end, both Peter Biskind (1983, 1985) and Bruce Kawin (1984) have
independently utilized symptomatic textual criticism to distinguish between the
codes of supposedly conservative [The Thing from Another World (1951)] and
progressive-leaning (anti-war, especially) [The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)]
films of the fifties cycle. Mark Jancovich (1996) has, however, convincingly argued
that the exact opposite interpretations can be easily drawn from these self-same
techniques, revealing the radical polysemy of supposedly coded texts, whose very
obscurity seems to act as a Rorschach text for the fears and desires of the
interpreter.

58  
 
 
high-point of the tendency toward scientific accuracy, On the Beach had

confidently begun this trend not only by shooting on location in an authentic

Navy submarine but by relying on the help of myriad military, scientific, and

medical advisors (which distributor United Artists prominently trumpeted in

press releases).6 Indeed, the premiere featured a panel of scientific experts,

including Dr. Linus Pauling, as well as many University of California and

Stanford faculty members, reading statements concerning the horrible

possibility of nuclear catastrophe, piggybacking on an information campaign

surrounding the negative effects of Strontium-90 radiation (the film’s

principle subject).

Set in the year 1964, On the Beach presents Australia as the last

haven of human life after the destruction of an unspecific World War III has

left the globe saturated with ever-approaching radiation. The cast mirrors

that of a cliché atomic monster movie, with representatives of the military

(Gregory Peck as American submarine captain Dwight Lionel Towers and

Anthony Perkins as Australian Lieutenant Peter Holmes) and science (Fred

Astaire as Julian Osborne), as well as civilian love interests (Ava Gardner as

                                                                                                               
6 Although the Navy had participated in the production of On the Beach, the
pentagon refused to allow official co-operation in the productions of The Bedford
Incident and Fail-Safe (New York Times August 20, 1964, 36) due to the official furor
that Seven Days in May and Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love the Bomb had caused.

59  
 
 
Moira Davidson, who experiences a brief affair with Towers, and Donna

Anderson as Holmes’s wife Mary). However, contrary to the formulas

described by Sontag the plot focuses on the complexities of characters’ social

and emotional lives, charting their gradual acceptance of their imminent

demise as the radiation from the war will soon arrive and finish the job of

nuclear holocaust. Many of the film’s situations revolve around the practical

mundane details that punctuate the survivors’ final days, which “end not

with a bang but with a whimper.” No coffee remains, but they have plenty of

sherry to drink from the cellars. The ethical quandaries that arise are

psychologically horrific but likewise pragmatic, such as the decision of

whether or not to euthanize the children.

As an ensemble film, the narrative focuses on each character’s

psychological response in turn, in the manner of a psychologically centered

melodrama. Dwight, apparently in profound denial about the death of his

family in the destruction of the United States, speaks of his wife and children

as if they are still alive—even discussing future prospects. Eventually, he

begins to take on Moira as a surrogate wife, even calling her by his wife’s

name. Donna refuses to accept her eventual fate and hurtles toward a

neurotic breakdown when Peter calmly broaches the topic of suicide pills.

Both Julian and Moira are alcoholic, and Julian also engages in a

particularly reckless run of the Australian Grand Prix. However, unlike more

60  
 
 
familiar post-apocalyptic exploitation scenarios which relish social

disintegration as an occasion for the cathartic expression of lawless violence

[as in the contemporary Panic in Year Zero! (1962) and the later Mad Max

(1979)], the characters of On the Beach maintain the semblance of pre-

disaster society by performing their existing roles and duties. What emerges

is a fatalistic banality and obvious denial of reality that results from a society

with “no future,” epitomized by situations including Tower’s sudden

promotion from submarine captain to Admiral of the U.S. Navy (as its

highest ranking survivor). Instead of presenting a stark picture of the horrors

of war in all its immediacy, as in The War Game, On the Beach provides an

image of “waiting for the end to come” congruent with the banality of

ordinary experience.7

                                                                                                               
7 In a letter to director Stanley Kramer, the novel’s author Nevil Shute admonishes
the film’s attempts at “realism”: “When Paxton introduces realism and shows the
unpleasant side of characters he degrades them” (Letter from Shute to Kramer
August 21, 1958, Stanley Kramer Papers Box 23). However, the depiction of the
survivors’ state of denial concerning the “end” (as well as their succumbing to
alcoholism) prefigure Robert J. Lifton’s later research on the physical mechanisms
observed in response to presence of a nuclear threat (1979, 7).

61  
 
 
 Fig. 2.2: In On the Beach (1959), a Coca-Cola bottle provides the last hope for the
human race.
 
A key sequence of melodramatic visual excess epitomizes the film’s

profoundly critical attitude [Fig. 2.2]. When a Morse code signal is heard

coming from San Diego, Towers travels from Australia to California to

investigate, accompanied by tremendous images of civilization’s peak

including the submarine itself and an entirely abandoned San Francisco. The

mystery of the code’s transmission is solved when the crew arrive to find the

height of modern civilization: an absurd Coca-Cola bottle, in all its ingenuity,

simplicity, beauty, cheapness, and allure, which is the only “survivor” of

62  
 
 
nuclear catastrophe, bumping against the telegraph key.8 In scenes such as

this one, and in an often-mocking hubris-ridden treatment of its characters

representing power and social responsibility (from captain to scientist), On

the Beach is a clear indictment not only of the bomb but also of the culture

that created it.9

If On the Beach reveals the horrifying conclusion of a possible nuclear

catastrophe, two films produced by Columbia, Fail-Safe (1964) and The

Bedford Incident (1965) [which contemporary reviewer Peter Bart noted for
                                                                                                               
8 A bullet-riddled exploding Coca-Cola machine also punctuates the skirmish
between Mandrake and Guano in Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop
Worrying and Love the Bomb: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
(1965) and Stan Vanderbeek’s Science Fiction (1959) would further collide the coca-
cola bottle with the V-2 rocket. In the post-apocalyptic landscape of Cormac
McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006), a Coke bottle would appear as a key moment of
transcendent beauty.
9 Shute had hoped the story would retain a somewhat optimistic tone with the
surviving Australians rising to the occasion, claiming, “In times of intense stress and
disaster people prove to be far stronger than they think that they would be
themselves. That is the underlying emotional idea of On the Beach” (Letter from
Shute to Kramer July 14, 1958, Stanley Kramer Papers Box 23). That this
representation seemed unfeasible in the film bears witness not only to the political
differences between Kramer and Shute but also to the change in public attitudes
represented by the information campaign accompanying the film’s release. Notably,
Shute’s attitude mirrored that of the Eisenhower administration, which in response
to the film reported: “It is inconceivable that in the event of nuclear war, mankind
would not have the strength and ingenuity to take all possible steps toward self-
preservation” (Boyer 1984, 824).

63  
 
 
its “stark, almost documentary tone” (1965, X7) ] provide additional

speculative, though formally naturalistic warnings to the audience by

depicting a nuclear disaster’s potential beginning. In the well-known Fail-

Safe scenario, reused for Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying

and Love the Bomb (1964, also Columbia), an unforeseen and unavoidable

nuclear attack on Moscow is caused by Cold War defense systems, despite the

best efforts of the sympathetic President (Henry Fonda). In The Bedford

Incident, news reporter Ben Munceford (Sidney Poitier) boards an atomic

submarine to observe and becomes embroiled in a battle of wits with Captain

Eric Finlander (Richard Widmark), an overzealous nuclear submarine

captain, when a dangerous potential conflict emerges with a Soviet sub.

However, in a reversal of the typical Poitier formula, Ben’s presence on the

ship fails to overcome the Captain’s hawkishness, instead catalyzing his

paranoiac tendencies into a destructive re-action that culminates in a

terminal mushroom cloud. In each of these cases, atomic disaster is presented

as profoundly plausible, even inevitable.

If such films represent the social problem melodrama at its strongest,

strengthened as they are by realistic settings and scenarios, even the period’s

films of fantasy spectacle would often combine realistic settings and anti-

bomb polemics borrowed from the problem formula. A notable example is the

independent British production The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961). Shot

64  
 
 
in a quasi-documentary fashion in and around a newspaper office, it remains

for its first hour a starkly realistic, procedural drama in the fashion of On the

Beach. Somewhat similar in plot to the ludicrously unscientific Voyage to the

Bottom of the Sea (1962) of the same era, it contains as a novelty an

ambiguous ending: Earth may have been saved, but perhaps not.10

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959) provided another attempt at

a post-apocalyptic social problem film. But like the independent precursor

Five (1950) it closely resembles, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil utilizes

an end of the world scenario to rehash apocalyptic religious clichés,

tempering its message of warning with a final note of renewal as the

survivors of the nuclear catastrophe walk off into the sunset hand-in hand.11

                                                                                                               
10 The potential subversiveness of The Day the Earth Caught Fire may be compared
with On the Beach because, as I. Q. Hunter notes, the film relies on a “questioning of
‘the Dunkirk Spirit’ and [a] cynicism toward the governing class as a whole” (1999,
103).
11 An intriguing variant on the “renewal” scenario of The World, the Flesh, and the
Devil (1959) is present in the British apocalypse These Are the Damned (1964).
Middle-aged American tourist Simon Wells (Macdonald Carey) shares with two
British youth (Teddy Boy King, played by Oliver Reed, and his sister, played by
Shirley Ann Field) the horrible discovery of a colony of radioactive children being
groomed for survival in a post-apocalyptic milieu. Through their mutual discovery,
the unlikely group is brought together through a common “nuclear consciousness.”

65  
 
 
Horror and Paranoia

In the previous section, I described the atomic disaster films following

On the Beach (1959) as strongly opposed to the version of sf disaster films

described by Sontag: strikingly pessimistic in their anti-nuclear attitudes

rather than Utopian and reliant on modes of realism—psychological, social,

scientific, and visual—rather than outright fantasy. However, despite the

surface differences between these and the fifties sf films, earlier “weirdies”

such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and The Incredible Shrinking

Man (1957) share many of the elements that contribute to the nuclear

problem films’ rhetorical power, including their tone of pessimism, preference

for “realistic” black and white photography, mundane social settings, and

alienated, paranoid protagonists. These fifties films, produced at the cusp of

this new direction in sf—share with the later films a powerful ability to

transform difficult, uncanny concepts and experiences into pregnant symbols

and ineffable experiences.

Fifties critic Richard Hodgens claims that the paranoid atomic fears in

sf films are mobilized purely to enhance a film’s horror appeal: “the

filmmakers have simply attempted to make their monster more frightening

by associating it with something serious” (cited in Hodgens 1959, 37). Bradley

Schauer (2010) likewise argues that the driving force behind increasingly big-

budget sf production in Hollywood has been an attempt to overcome the “pulp

66  
 
 
paradox,” that is, how to satisfy the public demand for “pulp” entertainment

by wrapping it in socially acceptable garb. I argue that producers radically

blurred the lines between pulp and art by producing ultimately polysemous

texts that increasingly satisfied the aesthetic and social expectations of both

forms.

If the prestige and success of On the Beach seems to distinguish it from

traditional fifties cinematic sf, Steven Sanders argues that even Invasion of

the Body Snatchers is notable primarily for its transposition of “noir paranoia

on [a] science fiction scaffolding” (2008, 55). Wheeler Winston Dixon likewise

includes fifties horror sf as a form of noir paranoia (marked by “perpetual

threat and contestation”) (2009, 4). However, suspicion may be raised and

then ameliorated [as in Sontag’s analysis (1965, 43)] or sustained and

deepened. Hodgens’s and Sontag’s criticisms reveal the apparent practical

difficulty of attempting “message-based” sf films before the release of On the

Beach (1959); thus, it is noteworthy that the successful social realist,

message-based films that did emerge in its wake followed the lead of films

such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) by mobilizing a paranoid form

imbuing uncanny horror into the mundane—and further sublating into the

form of paranoid horror such “realist” features as scientific facts and socially

plausible scenarios.

For instance, an ostensible ”thriller” film such as Fail-Safe depicts the

67  
 
 
paranoia of a protagonist spontaneously discovering himself trapped in a

horrific thought-experiment. Confounding his trouble, he often has difficulty

convincing others that anything is amiss (as occurs in The Invasion of the

Body Snatchers or the beginning of The Incredible Shrinking Man). In John

Frankenheimer’s paranoid, speculative scenarios The Manchurian Candidate

(1962) and Seven Days in May (1964), Maj. Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra)

and Col. Jiggs Casey (Kirk Douglas), respectively, must singlehandedly

unravel conspiracies to take over the government, signaling WWIII, from the

Communists in the case of the former or right-wing hawks in the case of the

latter. In Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the

Bomb (1964), a comic take on the Fail-Safe scenario, this role is given to the

befuddled Col. Mandrake (Peter Sellers), who in a particularly exasperating

scene cannot convince Col. “Bat” Guano (Keenan Wynn) of the importance of

reaching the president (also Peter Sellers) to deliver the fail-safe codes that

will return the bombers from the U.S.S.R. to America.

As early as The Incredible Shrinking Man, paranoid horror is already

profoundly psychological—represented in that film by the main character’s

visualizations and interior monologue as well as the narrative’s focus on the

psychodrama of the relationship between the shrinking man and his normal-

sized wife. But the shrinking man’s visualizations are not far removed from

Blackie (Dan O’Herlihy)’s recurring nightmare of a “flayed bull” in Fail-Safe.

68  
 
 
As in the Hollywood “psychological” tradition,12 epitomized by Spellbound

(1945) [in which the protagonist John Ballantyne (Gregory Peck)’s repressed

memories are represented by parallel lines and the “color white”], the

“weirdies” foreground their anxieties in conspicuous and oppressive symbols.

The conclusion of Planet of the Apes (1968) provides the most famous

example. After George Taylor (Charlton Heston) tries again and again to

convince the apes of what he knows, he realizes that he has been wrong all

along about the superiority of man to ape when he sees the ruins of the

Statue of Liberty, an image that symbolically consolidates the film’s

structural dyad of rocket and bomb.

With their prominent use, on the level of cinematography, of deep focus

and distorting lenses, these films fabricate impressionistic nightmare

tableaux to present the modern-as-uncanny. Vivian Sobchack describes the

uncanny transformation of the characters’ environment as one element of sf

poetics (1999, 114-117). On the Beach’s iconic scenes of an abandoned San

Francisco provide an orthodox example of this tendency within the nuclear

anxiety films. But whereas Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Incredible

                                                                                                               
12 On the Beach screenwriter John Paxton had notably somewhat specialized in
“psychological” films featuring depictions of states of neurosis and psychosis,
including Murder, My Sweet (1944) and The Cobweb (1955). As a director, Kramer
had previously depicted mental illness in the military in Home of the Brave (1949).

69  
 
 
Shrinking Man, without explicit targets for progressive critique, are forced to

focus on the psychological horror of paranoia itself (related to social and

sexual anxiety), the atomic anxiety films securely attach this uncanny horror

to present and future scenarios spurred by progress, with the realistic

situations of the social problem picture replacing the earlier films’ fantastic

and obscurely metaphorical scenarios.

The Incredible Shrinking Man’s focus on the mundane nevertheless

sacrifices verisimilitude in order to enhance through expressionistic

techniques its underlying castration theme. Through grotesque

manipulations of visual effects, the atomic paranoia films also revealed a

battery of explicitly reflexive anti-naturalist effects. The Bedford Incident

ends with an artistic representation of the whole crew being vaporized

(translated into the reflexive language of the immolation of the celluloid

itself) [Fig. 2.3]. In Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and

Love the Bomb, the plaintive “We’ll Meet Again,” freighted with nostalgia for

the longed-for end of World War II, provides ironic commentary on the

footage of the film’s ultimate doomsday explosions. In The War Game, voice-

over narration and a generally didactic tone provide distanciation alongside a

continual breaking of the “fourth-wall” as characters stare painfully directly

into the camera.

70  
 
 
 Fig. 2.3: The celluloid itself burns up at the conclusion of The Bedford Incident
(1965).

Andrew Tudor argues that the popular cinematic trend toward

paranoid horror in early sixties began due to the influence of Psycho (1960)

(1989, 184). However, the influence of paranoid sf-horror films (that is,

weirdies) on this trend seems worth considering as well. Likewise, if Charles

Ramírez Berg isolates in The Manchurian Candidate such formal elements as

“composition-in-depth,” “extended montage dissolve” and “complex mise-en-

scène” as directorial signatures (2011, 32-39), these techniques are also

indicative of a set of generic norms in that they are related to a larger

71  
 
 
paranoiac stylistic vocabulary mobilized by sf horror.13

Modernist Melodrama

If the bulk of American and British nuclear disaster films were social

problem melodramas, albeit with the occasional intrusion of horror paranoia,

international art cinema directors also adapted the topic of total destruction,

further displacing the scenario’s fantastic and broadly melodramatic

elements in favor of a more abstract style of treatment that András Kóvács

labels “modern melodrama” in his description of the early sixties films of

Michelangelo Antonioni. For Kóvács, what is “at stake” in the modern

melodrama, “is understanding helplessness”:

Modern melodrama is a type of melodrama in

which the protagonist’s reaction amounts to
searching for a way to intellectually understand the
environment, which precedes or replaces physical
reaction. The main cause of the protagonist’s
emotional distress in modern melodramas is not a
concrete natural, social, or emotional catastrophe.
No matter what concrete event triggers narrative
action, it is but a superficial manifestation of a
deeper and more general crisis for which no
immediate physical reaction is possible. The only

                                                                                                               
13 Further, as indicated above, Expressionism filtered through noir is perhaps the
progenitor of all such trends in post-war American filmmaking.

72  
 
 
 adequate immediate reaction is a passive
intellectual response of searching for
comprehension of the “general crisis” that will lead
to a choice that can result in a physical reaction.
. . . The “bigger power” in modern
melodrama is represented by something that is
stronger not by its presence but by its absence . . .
In terms of existentialist philosophy this invincible
power is called Nothingness. (2008, 89)

Within the realm of nuclear disaster, Jean-Luc Godard’s pastiche of

post-apocalypticism in Il nuovo mondo (1963) truly achieves such Modernist

heights by colliding pulp with European existentialism.14 An obtuse parody of

the post-apocalyptic “mutation” scenario of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend

(1954)15 and the uncanny “pod people” of Invasion of the Body Snatchers

(1956), Godard’s film focuses on the subtle and ongoing dehumanizing

transformation of Parisians following the apparent detonation of a nuclear

explosion over the city (the evidence of which is limited to a single newspaper

headline), as narrativized by its effects on a young couple’s disintegration.

Here, in distinction to Hollywood norms, there is not even the indication that
                                                                                                               
14 Here, the “pod people” scenario can be seen as heavily evocative of Sartre’s notion
of the pervasiveness of mauvaise foi (bad faith) in social transactions.
15 Richard Brody notes a meeting between Godard and producer André Michelin in
1964 in which Godard wished to cast Eddie Constantine in an adaptation of I Am
Legend. This project would later become Alphaville (Brody 2008, 223).

73  
 
 
the paranoid noir side of modern existence is set up to be vanquished, as

occurs in even the most evocatively symbolic Classical horrors from the

supernatural Cat People (1942) to Invasion of the Body Snatchers itself. Here,

rather, the horror persists as a thinly estranged commentary on present

“estrangement.”

Gradually, the population is rendered more and more “pod-like,” even

developing a habit for narcotizing tablets [possibly in a nod to Brave New

World (1932)’s Soma]. As in the paranoia films discussed above, the unnamed

Husband (Jean-Marc Bory) is seemingly aware that something is profoundly

amiss in his environment, but he cannot put the pieces together or solve the

mystery. Rather, he must helplessly watch his wife Alexandra (Alexandra

Stewart) and the rest of Paris fall away from him into increasing passivity. Il

nuovo mondo thereby provides a variation on Kóvác’s example of La notte

(1961) “where the characters’ passivity throughout the story is due to a

purely mental state of being un-aware of the reason for their marital crisis”

(2008, 89). In Il nuovo mondo, likewise, the characters are rendered passive

by their seeming inability to acknowledge the significance of the apparent

nuclear attack, which is narratively transformed into the guise of a banal

urban existence, thereby condensed into a single “primal” scenario of modern

alienation.

In keeping with Kóvács’s claim that “the main cause of the

74  
 
 
protagonist’s emotional distress . . . is not a concrete natural, social, or

emotional catastrophe,” no clear exegesis explains the causal relationship, if

any, among explosion, pills, passivity, or the growing estrangement between

the Husband and Alexandra, which expresses the broader physical and social

disintegration of the lifeworld on the level of intimate relationships—in

contradistinction to a more classical “weirdie” such as the British The Day of

the Triffids (1962), in which a more obvious sudden change in the population

(mass blindness) is explained as the result of a meteor shower which

subsequently affects the growth of motile carnivorous plants. If Triffids, with

its series of weird, unnatural, and seemingly incomprehensible events clearly

evoking/displacing twentieth-century urban war anxieties in general, and the

London bombing blitz in particular, is a Sontagian example of the disaster, Il

nuovo mondo then renders this sci-fi scenario more subtle by presenting

modern alienation as the essence of the weird rather than presenting weird

elements as aberrations from the everyday modern.

A similar case is found in Chris Marker’s La jetée (1962), a post-

apocalyptic story in which a time-traveler (“The Man,” Davos Hanich) finds

himself trapped in a closed time-line that loops perpetually from the horrific

post-atomic present back to the past, in an attempt to prevent eventual

destruction. The Man is driven to return to a particular memory, but at the

film’s conclusion he finally discovers its elusive “meaning”: he was the man

75  
 
 
he had seen shot on an Orly airport runway (jetée) as a child (killed by

another time-traveling assassin). As in Kóvács’s discussion, the goal of

understanding drives the protagonist, who is eventually confronted by the

apparent impossibility of true agency.16

As in Il nuovo mondo, Marco Ferreri’s Il seme dell’uomo (1969)

contains an oddly passive young couple at the center of its post-apocalyptic

story. Here, Cino (Marco Margine) and his partner Dora (Anne Wiazemsky)

are an impassive Adam and Eve amid a post-apocalyptic Eden. The couple

wanders, punctuated by encounters with symbolic and allegorical fragments

representing destruction—an Italian Renaissance painting covered in sand

[Fig. 2.4]; a Pepsi-Cola balloon just out of grasp; a beached whale. As in The

World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959), which utilizes a sexually provocative

love-triangle to represent lawlessness, Il seme dell’umomo would spice up its

narrative a bit by presenting the lovers’ responses to an intruder (Anne

Girardot). However, whereas in the earlier film this led to a thrilling battle of

wills, in Ferreri’s film Dora coldly murders the intruder and the story moves

on. The Italian Ecce Homo (1968) would more closely repeat also the formula

of The World, the Flesh, and the Devil albeit in a more “realist” manner.

The prominence of the beach as a setting in both Il seme dell’uomo and

                                                                                                               
16 As Paul J. Nahin notes, such time-travel paradoxes are exceeding common in sf
literature, even amounting to an official sub-genre of magazine sf (and thereby
representing the intellectual pole of the genre) (1993, 245-354).

76  
 
 
Ecce Homo as well as its use in the finale of Planet of the Apes further

resonates as an art cinema cliché. A beach, representing the borderline

between the facticity of landbound social life and the seemingly limitless flux

of the sea, is for instance charged with meaning throughout Ingmar

Bergman’s Det sjunde insglet (The Seventh Seal, 1957), at the beginning of

Michelanglo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) and at the conclusion of Federico

Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960), evoking the tendency toward analogical fabulist

structures in both art cinema and sf. I. Q. Hunter argues that the myriad

Jawsploitation films that emerged in the wake of this later (similarly

liminoid beach party’s) success, were the result of a “narrative structure of

surpassing elegance and simplicity” paired with a prêt-a-porter exploitation

formula (2009, 20). Applying the same logic to Det sjunde insglet in

particular, one may note that the re-use of elements of its “formula” may

amount to a readymade strategy for the uncanny confrontation with

contemporary atheistic apocalypticism within a variety of narrative genres

and modes, thereby providing a model for allegorical estrangement in its

framing story of the game with death. This element provides not only the

frame of the fantastic but also an intrinsically uncanny-paranoid motif that

parallels both the film’s ongoing argument concerning the existence of God

while simultaneously providing the model for an existential Godless universe

of radical freedom, dialectically linked via the evocation of medieval “fate”

77  
 
 
and further imbedded in the film’s agonistic mise-en-scène. Det sjunde

insglet’s rocky beach recapitulates a Romantic theater of uncanny catharsis

already found in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

(1719), Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1872), and Sartre’s Nausea (1938). Il

seme dell’uomo and Planet of the Apes would further retain its iconic imagery

of a “knight” on horseback.

Fig. 2.4: In Il seme dell’uomo (1969), a painting on the beach symbolizes global
destruction.

Comedy, Absurdism and Bricolage

In Bergman’s Nattvardsgästerna (Winter Light, 1962), Chinese nuclear

tests finally indicate once and for all God’s absence. But if Nattvardsgästerna

78  
 
 
provides a deep and somber philosophical and theological frame for the

consideration of the atomic age, Godard and Ferrerri’s sf pastiches meet the

absurdity of the nuclear paradigm with a consciously absurd response.17 The

central conflict of Il seme dell’uomo, raised obliquely throughout, lies in

Cino’s attempt to convince the traumatized Dora to have his child. But each

time he inarticulately suggests children, she inarticulately opposes. At the

film’s conclusion, Cino discovers a “solution.” After mixing a poisonous

anaesthetizing plant into her food, he rapes her in her sleep. Later, when she

begins to exhibit signs of pregnancy, Cino taunts her in a final childish

display on the beach, shouting, “The seed of man is sprouting! Lots of

children! The children of children! I impregnated! The seed of man is

sprouting! A thousand children! Lots of children! The children of children! A

thousand million kids! A million, a billion kids!” before another bomb falls,

wiping both out. This sequence is simultaneously horrifying and comic,

marking an absurd tonal break with the prior, distracted passivity of the

film’s characters and replacing the Romance of the “loss of innocence” with a

single perverse gesture of simultaneous (excessive) creation and destruction,

seemingly representing the contradictions of progress.

This tone of comedy also emerges in Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned

                                                                                                               
17 Sungook Hong (2007) notes that the “irrationality” and “schizophrenia” of the
bomb were put forth not only by critical theorists but also by prominent
psychologists, included Robert Adler and Erich Fromm.

79  
 
 
to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), The Day the Fish Came Out

(1967), The Bed-Sitting Room (1969), and Gas-s-s-s (1970) and thereby

presents the third major tendency of sixties sf disasters after the deployment

of a more straightforwardly melodramatic narrative impulse and the starkest

anti-naturalistic “modern melodrama” present in both Il nuovo mondo and Il

seme dell’uomo. In The Bed-Sitting Room, for instance, some time has passed

(three, or perhaps four years) since a nuclear holocaust resulting from a war

that lasted exactly two minutes and twenty-eight seconds. Surreal reversals

of sf clichés proliferate. Instead of mutating into monsters, for instance,

victims of radiation literally fall victim to reification by transforming into

mundane objects, including a chest of drawers and the titular “bed-sit.” Here,

we once again find the trope of a crystallized interpenetration of bourgeois

“banality” and horror, implicating bourgeois ideology in the logic of nuclear

Armageddon.

In a contemporaneous review of The Bed-Sitting Room, Michael

Dempsey notes that film’s aesthetic simultaneously “tries for a visual style

that . . . combines two approaches.” Location shooting “spreads . . . scenes

across a vast landscape” while artificial sets “[insist] on the play’s

theatricality”:

. . . the film’s post-nuclear world makes these

artifaces seem quite realistic, in a way. They
suggest well-known images of urban pollution—the

80  
 
 
 oil-fouled Santa Barbara beaches, junk yards, filthy
waterways. Furthermore, since this postwar setting
is happily something that we can still only dream
about, the theatrical stylization blends with the
realism to form a dream image. The rubble-strewn
canyons, the huge mounds of old shoes, the fields of
shattered crockery, while never ceasing to resemble
stage sets, also embody what we have imagined the
world would be after an atomic conflagration. The
lighting can be either theatrical spotlighting and
atmospherics or poison gas, air pollution, radiation.
The locations, even when most stagy, are both
naturalistic and reminiscent of “real” settings in
other movies—the jungles and hills of Fire on the
Plain, the searing vistas that stun the astronaut in
2001. (1971-72, 33)

A tendency toward realism in both The Bed-Sitting Room and Il seme

dell’uomo may be seen as an extension of the dense, deep-focus compositions

evident in for instance the Frankenheimer films, populating the frame with a

baroque constellation of objects apparently pregnant with meaning. In a post-

apocalyptical context, however, the objects of the modern world evoke very

different meanings “before” and “after” the nuclear fall. At the very least they

provide signifiers in a modern form of vanitas, in which a wealth of luxurious

goods reminds the viewer of the brevity and emptiness of worldly life and in a

81  
 
 
more subversive sense as former commodities reduced to their raw use-value

after having been wrenched from their ordinary cultural determinations.

These films’ ornate visions thereby provide an avant-garde uncanny

reminiscent of the achievements of the fantastic illusionist tradition in

Western painting going back to Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel (for

whom there was also a vogue in the sixties) (Wagner 1973, 13).18

In addition, however, the obvious “staged” theatricality of their

cultural detritus further suggests the evocation of the avant-garde

assemblages of the early sixties associated with artists including Arman and

the also-filmmaker Bruce Conner [Fig. 2.5]. Anna Dezeuze notes that for

William Seitz, who curated the 1961 Art of Assemblage exhibition at the

Museum of Modern Art, the significance of assembled materials was in their

purloined, rather than strictly autonomous, materiality:

The fact that the bricoleur speaks through things,

as well as with them, points, furthermore, to the
sociopolitical ramifications of assemblage in the
early 1960s Europe and America. As Jaimey
Hamilton’s essay on Arman . . . demonstrates,
assemblage presented itself as the privileged

                                                                                                               
18 See, for instance, Robert L. Delevoy, which suggests that Bosch’s work belongs to a
drug-induced “world of dreams” which places him in common with “Rimbaud,
Huxley, Artaud and Michaux in our own time. . . .“Far from impairing the creative
faculties,” Delevoy writes, “drugs can stimulate them” (1960, 76).

82  
 
 
 expression of a new consumer subject whose very
identity was defined through an increasingly
accelerated cycle of acquisition and disposal of
objects. (2008, 32)

Dezeuze further notes that the assemblages emerged on the

intellectual scene contemporaneous to the emergence of a broader interest in

the re-purposing procedures of bricolage inaugurated by the structural

anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in La Pensée sauvage (1962; translated in

1966 as The Savage Mind). The post-apocalyptic films’ focus on crafting

environments from cultural debris suggests a similar strategy, especially

combined with other tropes of visual fragmentation (evident especially

through eclectic production design and off-kilter shot composition) and

universally episodic narrative forms.19 In the aktion Study for the End of the

World, No. 2 (1962), staged at the site of a previous above-ground nuclear test

in Nevada, Swiss artist Jean Tinguely utilized robots to detonate a sculpture

assembled “from odds and ends rummaged at Las Vegas scrap yards”

                                                                                                               
19 The least critically successful of the nuclear comedies was easily Michael
Cacoyannis’s The Day the Fish Came Out (1967), which used the broadest possible
caricatures in its all-out farce of a horrific nuclear accident. Vogue reviewer Ann
Birstein notes the film’s weird patchwork aesthetic, highlighting “the naïve comic-
strip colour of [Cacoyannis’s] settings,” “a directorial approach which veers between
Greek neo-realism and some kind of 20’s expressionism,” and the film’s “Buck
Rogers costumes” (1967, 68).

83  
 
 
(Boettger 2012, 125), leaving a pile of “post-apocalyptic” wreckage.20

Fig. 2.5: The mise-en-scène of The Bed-Sitting Room (1969) evokes the era’s artistic
assemblages as well as Land art/Environments.

Jameson writes that a primary function of sf is “not to give us ‘images’

of the future” but to “demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imagine

the future” (1982, 152-153). In keeping with this dictum, the bricolage

aesthetic allows symbolic and allegorical fragments of the past to “stand-in”

for an unimaginable future while also reminding the viewer of the uncanny

hold the present and past provide. Fellini evokes this sense of sf in his

                                                                                                               
20 Remarkably, this was documented by NBC and aired on David Brinkley’s Journal
(P. Lee 2004, 85).

84  
 
 
discussion of Satyricon (1969), which is both contemporary to the films in

question and also akin to their visual logic, which he calls “mosaic”: “In

Satyricon, I show a time so remote from our own that we can’t even imagine

it . . . It was like speculating about life on Mars, but with the help of a

Martian [Petronius], so Satyricon satisfied in me some of my desire to make a

science-fiction film” (Chandler 2001, 171-172).

The Imagination of Negation

By relying on settings closely related to actually existing social

situations and nova based on probable atomic technology, the social problem

melodrama is rooted in the progressive traditions of social realism, while a

counter-form of irreverence is found in the absurd films (which may also

indicate that absurd social and political institutions can be altered when

unveiled as unnecessary).

Although these sf films hardly “allay” anxieties surrounding the bomb,

they nevertheless continue to portray the “imagination of disaster” as a form

of textual pleasure. If disasters express anxieties through “the peculiar

beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, making a mess” (Sontag 1965, 44),

the power of this negation is not intrinsically a form of plaisir over and above

jouissance, to use Roland Barthes’s distinction between the comfortingly

formulaic and the form of “writerly pleasure” that “discomforts . . . unsettles

85  
 
 
the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of

his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language”

(1975, 14).21

If Darko Suvin further demands for sf an overtly political form of

Brechtian estrangement (1972, 374) (and as well as an underlying Utopian

kernel), Tom Moylan notes that the key to the progressive dystopia

ultimately lies in the resistance of mythological or ideological closure” as a

form of “militant pessimism” (2001, 65). I argue that this dissatisfaction

extends to the various anxieties the films reveal, which resonate as an

expression of discontent, deliberate textual provocations, and an index of

dystopia: an imagination of negation.22

                                                                                                               
21 Incidentally, 1965 coincides with Sontag’s interest in Georges Bataille.
22 Each doomsday film follows Suvin’s prescription for estrangement while also
retaining clear nova—whether a gas [as in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil
(1959) and Gas-s-s-s! (1970)], a nuclear doomsday machine [as in Fail-Safe (1964)
and Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)],
an overabundance of radiation [as in On the Beach (1959)], or a mysterious post-
atomic disease [as in Il seme dell’uomo (1969) and The Omega Man (1971)]. Perhaps
these nova are too realistic or too non-descript to be truly Suvinian (as the novum is
meant to be a radical novel, rigidly scientific plot-catalyst radically at odds with
contemporary reality). Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., however, argues against a rigid
notion of a novum in favor of a “ludic” novum “more ecstatic than disciplinary” (2008,
55).

86  
 
 
Chapter Three: Dystopia

Raymond Williams, from “Science Fiction” (1959):

. . . Stories of secular paradise of the future

reached their peak, perhaps, in Morris’s News from
Nowhere [1890], and since then have been almost
entirely converted into their opposites: the stories
of a future secular hell. (1998, 357-358)1

François Truffaut, from “A Fable of Our Epoch” in

the press book for Fahrenheit 451 (1966):

. . . The action takes place on our planet [as

opposed to outer space], but with a slight
anticipation in time, so that one might almost say
Fahrenheit 451 takes place where and when each
individual viewer wishes. Within this
atmosphere—deliberately strange rather than
extravagant—the story has a simple postulate: it
deals with a society in which it is strictly forbidden
to read, or even to own books. In this society, the
                                                                                                               
1 H. Bruce Franklin provides a similar sentiment in 1966: “Today the capitalist
world’s literary visions of the future are almost all nightmares. Anti-Utopia seems to
have triumphed . . . The most widely-read survey of the science fiction of the “free
world” bears an apt title: New Maps of Hell. In this slough of despondency the
dominant nineteenth-century American views of the future may seem laughably
quaint and naïve” (391).

87  
 
 
 function of the firemen is not to put out fires, but to
track down the books that still exist, and publicly
burn them.2

In the previous chapter, I noted that although the initial British and

American prestige disaster films, including On the Beach (1959), The World,

the Flesh, and the Devil (1959), The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), Fail-

Safe (1964), and The Bedford Incident (1965), evince the formal and narrative

characteristics of the social problem picture (that is, melodrama enhanced by

appeals to social and psychological realism, and the movement to realistic

rather than fantastic nova), they are eventually joined by explicitly anti-

naturalistic narrative modes. Distanciation effects in the social problem films

gave way to the more vérité approach of The War Game (1965) and finally to

art cinematic adaptations as European auteurs joined the subject matter of

nuclear disaster to elements of modernist melodrama [especially in Il nuovo

mondo (1962) and Il seme dell’uomo (1969)]. Borrowing the European

cinema’s tendency toward stark portraits of modern alienation, the atomic

scenario thereby increases in gravitas while shedding its tendency toward

                                                                                                               
2 Lewis M. Allen Papers Box 1, Folder 7.

88  
 
 
overblown sci-fi jeremiad.3 In addition, the genre increasingly adopts formal

reflexivity in addition to a broadly critical attitude, especially prominent in

the use of a fragmentary (structurally episodic and visually creative and

allusive) aesthetic that presents so-called Western progress as the increasing

accumulation of literal and figurative detritus [prominent especially in Il

seme dell’uomo and The Bed-Sitting Room (1969)].

This trajectory strengthens the Suvinian relationship between the sf

genre and a Brechtian form of critical theater. In this chapter I will continue

my investigation into sixties sf cinema by examining the ways in which the

era’s filmmakers took on the most explicitly critical of the popular sf sub-

genres: the dystopia. Dominated by overtly experimental products (primarily

in the domain of International art cinema),4 the era’s dystopian films

                                                                                                               
3 A prominent if obtuse example can be found in an exchange from Ed Wood’s Plan 9
from Outer Space (1959), in which earthman Jeff Trent (Gregory Walcott) confronts
alien visitor Eros (Dudley Manlove) concerning the potential destructive force of an
imagined “Solanite bomb.” “So what if we do develop the Solanite bomb? We’d be an
even stronger nation than now.”“ Stronger. You see? You see? Your stupid minds!
Stupid! Stupid!”
4 Although a production for Paramount by Lewis Allen, Fahrenheit 451 (1966) was
artistically controlled to a large extent by Truffaut. For a time in 1963, Samuel
Bronston was set to produce an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
(1936), but this never came to fruition (Daily Variety September 3, 1963, 2). As a
consequence, Planet of the Apes (1968) and the much-maligned Ray Bradbury
adaptation The Illustrated Man (1969) remain the only Hollywood studio dystopias
of the era prior to the advent of the ecological dystopias of the early seventies.

89  
 
 
continue the genre’s tendency toward increasingly anti-naturalist conceptual

experiments, re-invigorating the common critique of enlightenment implicit

in earlier literary forms including dystopian fiction, travel narrative, and

picaresque satire.5

Scholars of sixties culture note that although the era seems to

represent a high-water mark in technological and scientific optimism [or,

from a counter-perspective, “the last moment that many Americans

entertained much hope for the future” (Combs 1993, 69)], a counter tendency

tempered this optimism by what Timothy Moy calls “the broad-based critique

of the value of [science and technology]” (2001, 305). In addition to concerns

surrounding nuclear weapons (which had been supported and then protested

by public intellectuals), Moy notes the popularity of Rachel Carson’s Silent

Spring (1962) (which led to a popular backlash against the use of the

pesticide DDT) and the influence of Thomas Kuhn’s commentary on scientific

authority The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) (from within the

realm of scientific authority itself) as establishing the parameters for this

assessment (2001, 305-310).

Likewise, the emergent field of future studies, of which a major early

figure was the Marxist-inspired Ossip Flechtheim, abandoned the earlier

                                                                                                               
5 Stacy Burton (2014) provides a discussion of the relationship between modernism
and the travel narrative.

90  
 
 
futurists’ unbridled technological and scientific optimism in favor of a critique

of the role of scientific knowledge, paralleling the assessments of the more

explicitly Marxian critics Jacques Ellul and Herbert Marcuse (Andersson

2012, 1412-1413). Marcuse, for instance, characterizes the “famous neutrality

of pure science . . . as an illusion, because neutrality disguises, in the

mathematical-ideational forms, the essential relation to the pre-given

empirical reality,” that is, the ideological character of scientific knowledge

(quoted in Gandesha 2004, 193).6 Moy calls this trend the “counter culture

critique of technocracy” and also includes in it Lewis Mumford and Theodore

Roszak (2001, 305). Jenny Andersson claims that for these writers, who still

largely reflected a Marxian and Ernst Blochian optimism for progress, the

tremendous freeing potential of science and technology was far from

actualization and could only be solved through an understanding of the

future “as an object of human imagination, creativity, and will” (2012, 1413).

In the conclusion to the previous chapter, I described the nihilistic

atomic disaster scenario as a dramatization of Utopian negation. The bomb’s

symbolic representation of the dialectic of enlightenment however reminds us

that the negation disaster provides may also represent the disavowal of a

complicity between enlightenment Utopian values and a potentially

                                                                                                               
6 This position again parallels surrealism, which also offers as its source of
subversion the critique of “objective reality” (and for which André Breton substitutes
“objective chance”) (Breton 1969, 60).

91  
 
 
dystopian future. I will describe the ways in which sixties sf dystopias

thereby provide an inversion of accepted narratives of continuous

technological progress through a dystopian reading through a reading of the

marvelous modern Utopia as dystopia.

Sixties filmmakers infused their dystopian future visions with

byzantine concatenations of sf critical conceits from the Western cultural

tradition, producing outright adaptations [in the cases of Fahrenheit 451

(1966) and A Clockwork Orange (1971)] as well as films [such as Privilege

(1967) and THX-1138 (1971)] which both reference contemporary cultural

criticism and pastiche elements from the tradition of literary dystopias

extending from the earliest proto-sf to the more recent literary blueprints of

Brave New World (1932) and 1984 (1949). In my presentation of this sub-

genre, I will however focus on the two narrative tendencies that appear most

frequently amid the sub-genre’s broad inclusiveness of sf critical themes: the

rejection of banal bourgeois society as a Huxleyian (and Marcusian) form of

dystopia, and the double-edged potential of youth counterculture. In doing so,

I will highlight the various interpretive inversions that the era’s cinematic

dystopian visions provide.

The Huxleyian-Marcusian Imagination

Just as On the Beach (1959) heralded the beginning of the sixties

92  
 
 
nuclear disaster films, the starkly sf, overtly anti-communist Columbia

Pictures film adaptation of 1984 (1956) established a precedent for the

explicit use of sf cinema to critique an imagined totalitarian scientific-

rational future. However, the films that followed 1984’s lead moved past its

alarmist fifties critique of science-in-the-service-of-communism toward a

broader counter-cultural evaluation of the threats to liberty latent within

Western bourgeois praxis itself.7 The sixties dystopian films are therefore

evocative of the era’s broader counter cultural critiques, which Douglas

                                                                                                               
7 Mark Jancovich interprets this implicit aspect of the fifties formula as its key
structural feature:
If the alien was at times identified with Soviet
communism, it was also implied that this was only the
logical conclusion of certain developments within
American society itself. The system of scientific-
technical rationality was impersonal, and it oppressed
human feelings and emotions. It did not value
individual qualities, but attempted to convert people
into undifferentiated functionaries of the social whole,
functionaries who did not think or act for themselves
but were ordered and controlled from without by
experts. It is for this reason that even in the most pro-
scientific of 1950s invasion narratives, the scientists
often display a respect for, and a fascination with, the
aliens which, it is stressed, represent their “ideal” of a
society ordered by scientific-technical rationality (1996,
26).

93  
 
 
Kellner (1984) indicates represent a significant achievement in

“conceptualizing the historical stage after [George] Orwell’s totalitarian

societies.” For Marcuse, “the synthesis of capitalism and technology”

constituted “a new form of social domination”:

One-Dimensional Man provides an analysis of. . . a

totalitarian society which uses technology,
consumerism, media, language, the state, and
culture and ideology as new instruments of social
control and domination. Marcuse’s use of the
admittedly loaded and rhetorical term
“totalitarianism” to describe advanced capitalist
societies is a conscious attempt to remold and
reconstruct political discourse so as to take a term
that is used to attack fascist and communist
societies and apply it to capitalist societies. In
doing so, Marcuse, I would suggest, implicitly
provides a rebuttal to those who use the term to
attack communism, or to equate communism and
fascism, and is also able to suggest parallels
between the worst features of “totalitarian” fascist
and communist societies and contemporary
technocapitalism. (Kellner 1984)

Mark Decker claims George Lucas’s THX-1138 (1971) is a “Marcusian

critique,” noting the film’s collapsing of communism and capitalism into a

single model of “industrial society” (2009, 425). However, whereas THX-1138

94  
 
 
consolidates this vision into an ordered, claustrophobic world of overtly

totalitarian repression similar to1984, earlier sixties films including La

decima vittima (1965), Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and Privilege (1967) had more

subversively blurred the distinction between a “totalitarian” future scientific

dystopia and the material prosperity Cold War containment strove to protect,

with “the good life” re-configured as a form of sociopolitical repressive middle-

class affluence and consumerism.8

In doing so, these films illustrate James Combs’s claim that the

ascendant dystopian vision of the sixties sf was the “[Aldous] Huxleyian

scenario” of Brave New World (1932), which inverts earlier Utopian

technological visions of a future free from alienation by “posit[ing] an elite

that believes itself to be benevolent ruling through the manipulation of

behavior based in the technology of pleasure” (1993, 76). Indeed, Kellner

(1984) and Peter Firchow (2007) discuss a number of specific similarities

between Huxley and Marcuse, which is no doubt predicated on the influence

                                                                                                               
8 At the root of sixties dissent, Todd Gitlin nominates “affluence and its opposite, a
terror of loss, destruction, and failure” (1987, 19). See Detlev Claussen (2004) for a
discussion of Frankfurt School roots of this critique.

95  
 
 
of the former upon the latter.9

Marcuse follows Huxley’s vision in his analysis of

how mass consumption produces false needs that
integrate individuals into the consumer society,
how sexuality is manipulated to produce social
conformity, and how an entire system of education,
indoctrination, and noncoercive social control
produce tendencies toward conformity, submission,
sameness. (Kellner, 1984)

If this Huxleyian vision predominates, permeating even the Orwellian

THX-1138, the sixties nevertheless may be superficially divided between

films that strongly retain the fifties emphasis on contemporary settings and

those that follow the tradition of works such as Brave New World and

Yevngeny Zamyatin’s novel We (1921) by extrapolating from present social

                                                                                                               
9 In 1942, Marcuse gave a paper on Brave New World (later published in 1955) at the
Institute for Social Research as part of a larger conference on Huxley, which also
contained contributions from Adorno and Horkheimer (Claussen 2004, 53). Adorno
claims that the Huxleyian position described in Brave New World should be seen
fundamentally as a European bourgeois-intellectual reaction to “American
civilization” [that is, the “new world” represents America] (1967, 99). (If the negative
presentation of mass culture in Brave New World were not enough, books
representing European culture in particular are forbidden.) This reading would
seem helpful in explaining the post-war return to Huxley, paralleling the rise of
America as a world power.

96  
 
 
tendencies nightmarish future visions. Both tendencies share a stylistic

vocabulary rooted in contemporary sixties culture and closely engaged with

the Pop Art visual paradigm the British Independent Group artist Richard

Hamilton calls the “corny future” (Petersen 2009, 39-44). This involves the

self-conscious burlesque of a utopian sf future by exaggerating the futurist

optimism found in popular science literature, comic books, pulp sf,

advertising, and government propaganda [especially that of previous decades

(retro-futurism)]. The sixties constellation of sf dystopia often reveals this

self-conscious Pop sensibility (and evocation of the present) within a film of

ostensibly future dystopia.10

Alphaville, the opening film at the Third New York Film Festival in

September 1965, was the first serious sixties cinematic foray into this class of

dystopian vision, “an attack on the over-organized, hyper-intellectual world of

                                                                                                               
10 This avant-garde tendency is also found for instance in René Clair’s earlier Paris
qui dort (1926), which re-imagines the Eiffel Tower as a mad scientist’s laboratory in
manner similar to Chris Marker’s and Jean-Luc Godard’s estrangements of
contemporary Paris in La jetée and Alphaville. Chris Darke provides a history of
commentary on the computer in Alphaville, which is often considered a parody of or
comment on the estranged modern car radio of Cocteau’s Orphée (Orpheus, 1950)
(2005, 94-96).

97  
 
 
modern man” (J. Thomas 1966, 48).11 According to Richard Brody, Jean-Luc

Godard envisioned the film as an adaptation of elements from I Am Legend

(1954) [as in the earlier Il nuovo mondo (1963)] along with Brian Aldiss’s

Non-Stop (1958), which depicts life in a city-sized spaceship (2008, 223).

Godard himself described the film in print in December 1964:

A secret agent will arrive in a city, Alphaville. He

will at first be bewildered, then he’ll understand,
from certain signs, that the inhabitants, the
Literates, are mutants . . . .Constantine, my
Illiterate, will notice that certain words have
disappeared . . . Anna [a Literate] will not know the
word “to love” . . . The Literates will not know the
word “handkerchief” either, because they won’t
know how to weep . . . I will show a thought that
tries to combat this, and which to some extent
succeeds. Anna will finally be able to weep. (Brody
2008, 225)

                                                                                                               
11 A few dystopian-structured atomic parallels did, however, precede it. The Lord of
the Flies (1963) places amid a World War III scenario a dystopian microcosm of
English schoolchildren trapped on a Robinsonian island in a manner very much in
keeping with the “social problem” style. The Time Machine (1960), produced
meanwhile in the lavish George Pal style, had somewhat transformed Wells’s
original dystopian vision of a class-divided humanity devolving into separate species
through time and natural selection by inserting a nuclear war and thereby
converting an otherwise purely socialist parable into a story of post-atomic
mutation.

98  
 
 
 This gloss provides a basis for comparison with the standard

evaluation of a scientific-technological society, especially as the explanation

for the new social order in Alphaville is a form of “computer programming.”

However, Truffaut’s contemporaneously produced Fahrenheit 451 (1966)

brings this criticism of technocratic administration closer to the Marcusian

vision by implicating consumerism and media control in the future’s banal,

conformist police state, where books are banned for the good of all. In a

contemporaneous review of Fahrenheit 451 for Film Quarterly, George

Bluestone brings out the narrative’s critique of bourgeois consumerism:

Linda, Montag’s wife, lives among her objects, not

in them, and her experience is literally skin-deep.
Her frozen dinners and televised judo
demonstrations represent the world of what Daniel
Borstin calls the “pseudoevent,” which Truffaut
carries to its absurd and sinister conclusion. (1967,
3)

Elio Petri’s satirical La decima vittima (The Tenth Victim, 1965) (based

on Robert Sheckley’s 1953 short story “Seventh Victim”) also features a world

dominated by television and comic books in which the pursuit of consumer

pleasures and outlandish sexual games are the only goals. Unregulated

violence has been entirely abolished, not through repression, but because

individuals with violent tendencies are allowed to participate in a legalized

99  
 
 
murder game, alternating between hunters and hunted. Survivors are

rewarded with money, especially if they can arrange for a sponsored,

televised killing. A sexual dimension is added as Caroline (Ursula Andress)

and Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) easily transform their hunter-hunted

relationship into a game of sexual conquest. Set at a television station which

produces pornography and “food porn” to placate the society’s majority class

of “low-drives,” Nigel Kneale’s BBC television film The Year of the Sex

Olympics (1968) [Fig. 3.1] would further bring out the era’s tendency (also

especially evident in Fahrenheit 451) to link television with mindless

consumption.

These examples together reveal a Huxleyian constellation of concerns

each presented by inverting scenarios of formal scientific Utopianism into

familiar dystopian forms. Rather than provide freedom, the technocratic

society manifests a spirit of conformism that threatens individual freedom,

while the narcotizing, de-sublimating influence of consumerism and the

media fills increased leisure time rather than enriching personal or collective

life. The protagonists of The Year of the Sex Olympics, Alphaville, Fahrenheit

451, and THX-1138 each challenge dominating prohibitions and prescriptions

on love before finally escaping the confines of their technological cities, often

to venture out to a pre-modern agrarian existence evocative of William

100  
 
 
Morris’s Utopian socialism.12 In this inversion, tremendous technological

achievements fail to provide a sense of “wonder,” which is instead a

mysterious quality only available through the re-immersion into the “life-

world” of pre-modern culture, as in Huxley’s Brave New World and Island

(1962).13

This tendency of inversion can also be found in the films’ visual and

narrative stylization, which often evokes a sense of structured semiotic

inversion in keeping with these inverse re-interpretations of scientific Utopia.

As in earlier filmic visions of the future, the cinematic medium provides an

opportunity for the depiction of the future’s modern wonders through

spectacle and attractions [going back to the initial proto-sf The Airship

Destroyer (1909)] (Baxter 1970, 16). The dystopian films turn this convention

on its head—that is, just as future Utopia is inverted into dystopia, the

                                                                                                               
12 Adorno had found Huxley’s evocation of Utopian socialism bourgeois and
“reactionary” in its false choice between “the barbarism of happiness and culture as
the objectively higher condition that entails unhappiness” (1967, 112).
Fahrenheit 451’s rather Robinsonian iteration would see further repetition as
an aspect of political dissent in Godard’s Weekend (1967), which alludes to the
earlier film’s “Book People” by populating the countryside with literary characters
representing intellectual tradition.
13 Only Planet of the Apes (1968) would attempt to portray the perils of a future
retreat from science, leading to the re-establishment of a theocratic state. Beneath
the Planet of the Apes (1970) would however reverse this strategy by rewarding with
nuclear destruction the apes’ return to scientific inquiry.

101  
 
 
modern-marvelous is reconfigured as the modern-banal. In Sontagian terms,

the nuclear disaster films depict the banality of horror while the dystopian

films present the horror of banality.

Fig. 3.1: The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968)’s “The Hungry Angry Show” mixes food
and violence.

An example of the modern-banal can be found in the choice to depict

far future settings through a constellation of familiar modern visual icons is

almost universal. Contemporaneous critic Bernard Beck sees the strategy of

102  
 
 
assembling a dystopian future from images of the present as producing a

mode of futurism unequivocally based in the extrapolation from the present

(1971, 62-63). Truffaut complicates this claim somewhat by indicating that

his choice to deviate from a far-future vision should be seen as a response to

the aesthetic infusion of futurism within popular culture (including James

Bond and the “space age” designs of Courrèges) that already appeared to him

banal. The eclectic production design he eventually chose seemed more

“strange and abnormal” and therefore the effect more powerful when

transformed to the “banal”: “It was [ultimately] a question of treating a

fantastic story with familiarity, by making strange and abnormal everyday

scenes look banal” (Truffaut 1966, 13).14

                                                                                                               
14 A series of statements reveal that Truffaut aimed at renewing the genre’s
potential for cognitive estrangement with a number formal alienation strategies: He
desired “a period piece” (Truffaut 166, 13), “a film about life as children see it”
(Truffaut 1966, 22), “a science fiction in the style of La Parapluies de Cherbourg”
(Truffaut 1967, 11), and something unlike “an American left-wing film” (Truffaut
1966, 22). David Anshen argues that Alphaville should be viewed within the context
of Italian Neo-realism, noting that estrangement can be elicited through a form of
parable-like storytelling and an aesthetic that attempts to “capture the reality of a
historical moment in all its strangeness” (2007, 101). Allan Thiher argues that
Alphaville presents the contemporary urban environment “as [a] crucible in which
language is ground up, altered, emptied of meaning, and, finally, placed in the
service of totalitarian repression” (Thiher 1976, 949) by pointing especially to the
film’s saturation with intertexts from popular culture as a prescient avatar of
cultural brutality.

103  
 
 
 What emerges is an aesthetic of disappointment, de-spectacularization,

and dysfunction. In THX-1138—as opposed to the perfect, technologically

ordered society of “The Veldt” section of the Ray Bradbury adaptation The

Illustrated Man (1969) [Fig. 3.2], in which psychological ennui is the main

concern15—the totalizing technological society is a bureaucracy marked by

incompetent administrators and technologies that frequently break down,

leading to an ongoing series of industrial accidents,16 including one accident

which is presented in prosaic detail during the film’s exposition [Fig. 3.3].

Similarly, La decima vittima’s killing game is divorced of its shocking quality

as characters treat its rules and conventions with detached familiarity [Fig.

3.4]

                                                                                                               
15 Compared with the other contemporaneous dystopias mentioned, The Illustrated
Man almost parodies itself in the manner of Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973).
16 Cinematic precursors to this trope may be found in Metropolis (1927) and Modern
Times (1936).

104  
 
 
Fig. 3.2: Claire Bloom and Rod Steiger face future ennui in The Illustrated Man
(1969).

Fig. 3.3: The accident that begins THX-1138 (1971) is revealed on surveillance
monitors.

105  
 
 
 Fig. 3.4: La decima vittima (1965): “You can’t shoot in bars.”

Self-consciously camp futures are less ambiguous in their use of

semiotic inversion, achieved through the parodic exaggeration of Utopian

futurist optimism—represented by a constellation of low culture and sf

fantasy—with the ironic intent of parodying the short-sightedness of “space

age” confidence in science and the masquerade of bourgeois ideology as

material and intellectual progress. This exaggerated form of semiotic

inversion can be seen especially in films of the American and European

avant-garde and the collages of the British Independent Group (Petersen

106  
 
 
2009, 21).17 As Rob Latham (2011) notes, similar collages (in the tradition of

Situationist détournement) were also common in the pages of new wave sf

magazine New Worlds. In cinema, Stan Vanderbeek’s experimental “collage

film” Science Friction (1959) comes perhaps the closest to this paradigm (as

described by David E. James):

. . . The debris from print advertising and popular

press functions . . . [as] the major source of imagery
by which the satire on the confrontational aspect of
the cold war, the arms race, and modern technology
in general is articulated . . . [And] it is itself the

                                                                                                               
17 Aldiss claims that in Europe “there was no pulp phenomenon” (2004, 510), thereby
indicating that it was thereby free from a negative association in the countries that
created highbrow sf literature. However, Edward James notes that imported
American sf formed a part of a broader constellation of American consumer culture,
allowing it to represent Americanization more generally (1994, 54). Carlo Pagetti
likewise claims that this association with American culture ultimately harmed the
reputation of sf in Italy in the fifties and sixties, identifying the genre with
“American mass culture and its cheap mythology of technological triumph” (1987,
263). Pagetti further describes the 1962 translation of Kingsley Amis’s New Maps of
Hell as a turning point toward the Italian critical popularity of sf (1979, 321).
The larger avant-garde artistic relationship to sf is epitomized by Dutch
Situationist Constant Nieuwenhuys, who worked on an architectural proposal for an
anti-capitalist Utopian future society called New Babylon between the years 1959-
1974. His essay “Another City for Another Life” contains the following sf framing
statement: “We crave adventure. Not finding it on earth, some have gone seeking it
on the moon. We prefer to wager first on a change on earth” (Andreotti 2000, 56).

107  
 
 
 object of satire, the manifestation of a logical
connection between the materialistic obsessions of
advertising and the permeation of the texture of
everyday life by technologic overdevelopment.
Newspapers turn themselves into missiles, and
rockets are constructed out of pictures of the tail
fins of fifties automobiles. (1989, 140)18

A more modest détournement is most apparent in the opening of

Lucas’s THX-1138, which takes the form of a modified trailer for Buck Rogers

(1939), reconfigured as “Buck Rogers in the 20th Century”:

Buck Rogers in the 20th Century! Buck Rogers, now

adventuring in the amazing world of the 20th
century. By turning a little dial to project us ahead
in time, we’re able to be right with Buck and his
friends, in the wonderful world of the future, a
world that sees a lot of our scientific and
mechanical dreams come true. And, you know,
there’s nothing supernatural or mystic about Buck.
He’s just an ordinary, normal human being who
keeps his wits about him.

                                                                                                               
18 Other avant-garde films alluding to pulp sf include Bruce Conner’s Cosmic Ray
(1962), the film of Claes Oldenburg’s Happening Ray Gun Theater (1962), Ron Rice’s
Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man (1962), and Paul Shartis’s Ray Gun Virus
(1966).

108  
 
 
 While this introduction deviates significantly from THX-1138’s overall

tone of modernist melodrama, the underground 16mm Sins of the

Fleshapoids (1965) acts out an extended romantic space melodrama which

parodies tropes plucked by the handful from dime novels, pulps, comics,

serials, and fifties B-movies. Visually oriented in a far-off exotic hodge-podge

space locale, Sins of the Fleshapoids [Fig. 3.5] lampoons the dystopian trope

of a future prohibition on love as well as the Utopian impulse represented by

its overcoming (as in 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and THX-1138) by portraying the

rebellious love of a pair of clunky robots (Bob Cowan and Maren Thomas)

who murder their philandering, hedonistic masters in their pleasure domes

and produce as their lovechild the most vulgar of commodities representing

the future: a cheap, metallic toy robot.19

                                                                                                               
19 Sins of the Fleshapoids’s soundtrack is taken from Hollywood soundtrack records
including Bernard Herrmann’s The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1957), providing
another example of direct re-purposing.

109  
 
 
 Fig. 3.5: A human (Gina Zuckerman) celebrates freedom from toil while her
Fleshapoids, including Xar (Bob Cowan), serve her hand and foot.

In the future sequence of Marco Ferreri’s Marcia nuzale (The Wedding

March, 1965), the ironic depiction of a rebellious future love culminates in

absurdity as love in the late twentieth century “reach[es] the ideal Utopian

society” consisting of “the manufacture of artificial men and women, created

exclusively for marriage. . . . Thanks to machines, we shall arrive at so

110  
 
 
complete an ‘automation’ that all is available, as in Eden” [Fig. 3.6].20 The

result is that, in this future paradise, men and women all travel around with

nude, full-sized (and rather unconvincing) human dolls in whose arms they

spend countless carefree hours (that is, finally freed from the “alienation” of

human social relations and allowed to commune fully with their

commodities).

Fig. 3.6: In Marcia nuzale (1965), marriage is “solved” via the creation of android
“spouses.”

 
 
 
 
                                                                                                               
20 My translation from the original Italian

111  
 
 
Present as Future

Several other dystopian films entirely eschewed the pretense toward

“future visions” in order to imbed further a dystopian future into the fabric of

the present. For instance, in Jacques Tati’s PlayTime (1967), the inscrutable

marvel of contemporary Paris is presented in dystopian fashion with an

emphasis on its most futuristic and disorienting aspects. An affectionately

comic stereotype of a traditional Frenchman, M. Hulot (also played by Tati)

had provided a marked contrast to the hurly-burly of perpetually busy urban-

dwellers in Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, 1953) and

Mon oncle (1958) by reveling in simple pleasures and frequently taking time

to observe and inhabit his surroundings. In the modern, futuristic world of

PlayTime (1967), Hulot—now often only a speck in a densely packed 70mm

frame [Fig. 3.7]—has completely lost his place. As in THX-1138, PlayTime

reveals the challenge modern urbanism poses to traditional forms of social

being through the spatial confusion of its characters, who struggle to find

their way around the city’s initially impressive-looking buildings, evoking

Walter Benjamin’s presentation of “great cities” as an expression of “the

boundless maze of indirect relationships, complex mutual dependencies and

compartmentalizations into which human beings are forced by modern forms

112  
 
 
of living” (2002, 90-91).21 As in La decima vittima, PlayTime strikes a stance

of satiric irony, as the characters face annoyances but ultimately retain their

common optimism for all things modern despite the obvious drawbacks of a

continual alienation from their surroundings and each other.

Fig. 3.7: PlayTime (1967) visualizes compartmentalization.

 
 
In one evaluation of the sf genre, Fredric Jameson claims,

“technological change has reached a dizzying tempo, in which so-called

‘future shock’ is a daily experience,” so that “[sf] narratives have the social

function of accustoming their readers to rapid innovation, of preparing our

                                                                                                               
21 David Cunningham and Jon Goodbun (2006) provide a concise history of the
Marxist critique of urban architecture. (In fact, many of PlayTime’s massive sets
[“Tativille”] were constructed especially for the film.)

113  
 
 
consciousness and our habits for the otherwise demoralizing impact of change

itself” (1982, 151). Sf therefore takes on the function (described by Benjamin)

of “the big-city modernism of Baudelaire [which] provided an elaborate shock-

absorbing mechanism for the otherwise bewildered visitor to the new world of

the great nineteenth-century city” (Jameson 1982, 151). Such an

interpretation is certainly apparent in PlayTime, which crystallizes into

comic scenarios the traumatic character of modern “big-city” existence. It

would also provide an explanation for the film’s turn to a “happy ending,” in

which a number of urban dwellers ultimately find a way to connect to one

another by throwing a boisterous party in a terrible mismanaged restaurant.

Suddenly, the city appears as a colorful carnival. While other “dystopian”

films set in the present may provide comparable catharsis, their ostensible

pessimism edges out PlayTime’s final glimpse of optimism.

Ugo Gregoretti’s proletarian satire Omicron (1963) finds yet another

ironic variation on the “pod people” scenario of Invasion of the Body

Snatchers (1956), now self-consciously based in a pun on the Marxist concept

of “alienation.”22 In Omicron, factory worker Angelo (Renato Salvatori) dies

as a result of an industrial accident and is inhabited by the titular

extraterrestrial assigned the duty of scouting out the Earth for a possible
                                                                                                               
22 Though not evincing an explicitly sf narrative form, Gregoretti’s earlier Il pollo
ruspante (Free-Range Chicken, 1963) had used similar estrangement techniques to
provide a fabulistic satire of bourgeois affluence.

114  
 
 
future invasion. Alongside the general satire resulting from the

anthropological inversion of a rational outsider’s point of view (“Damn, we’ve

discovered a prehistoric species!”), Marxist proletarian allegorical elements

abound. At first, for instance, Omicron is unable to activate Angelo’s thought

and language centers but can control his motor centers to reproduce and

learn physical movements. When his factory bosses at the auto lubrication

plant discover the speed and ease of his mimicry, they rehire the resurrected

Angelo who is quickly able to out-produce all other workers at the factory

with speed and precision. The factory’s efficiency experts then plan to

“analyze, isolate, and reproduce” his “brain damage” (“for scientific purposes,

only”). When Omicron reports back to alien superiors in space, he notes that

the Earth has a “closed cycle” of class and that they need only to take over

the bodies of the bosses in order to completely control the planet [Fig. 3.8].

However, a flaw in this plan is revealed when a twinge of Angelo’s class-

consciousness begins to interfere with Omicron’s control, and he begins a

strike against the factory bosses. Eventually, the aliens do take over the

bodies of the ruling classes. However, in order to counteract the dangers of

class-consciousness, they propose the “prohibition of love, of speaking and of

thinking . . . ideas [and] emotions.” “Whoever insists on thinking will be

punished with amputation of the head,” they agree, exhaling enormous puffs

of tobacco smoke.

115  
 
 
 H2S (1969), a Pop Art-resonate sixties dystopian Italian comedy from

1969 for Paramount, although set in the future, features a similarly explicit

form of Swiftian satire. In one scene, a group of the three dignitaries of the

ruling class (decked out in fancy costumes and wigs) discuss what to do with

the single unruly youth (Denis Gilmore) the film has followed. The

technocrat’s answer: “Repression. It is necessary to insist on the path of

repression. The boy’s behavior is a threat to the collective order. He suffers

from individualism? Then, the solution can only be of a scientific kind. Take

the brain of a submissive . . . Transplant it in the boy’s head. See him, from

now on, grateful, smiling, obedient.

Fig. 3.8: In Omicron (1963), alien visitor Omicron has the power to see through class
relations (and clothing).

116  
 
 
 In Hiroshi Teshigahara’s contemporarily set dramatic art film Tanin

no kao (The Face of Another, 1966), professional worker Okuyama (Tatsuya

Nakadai) is also in an industrial accident, now involving chemicals, which he

survives, but is horribly disfigured. His estrangement from his wife leads him

to pursue a therapy that centers on the sf novum of a completely lifelike

face/mask—the titular “face of another”—which provides a temporary

fantasy-solution but cannot solve Okuyama’s ennui, ultimately leading to his

murder of his wife.

In addition to the theme of ego-identity and its relation to self-image,

Tanin no kao explores the social marginalization around deformity, as

Okuyama’s story is paralleled with that of a young female hibakusha (atomic-

affected person, played by Miki Irie) disfigured by the Nagasaki bombing and

eventually driven to suicide. The parallels between the two stories suggest a

broader analysis of the inadequacy of instrumental rationality to forecast and

solve the modern sources of physical and psychological trauma. Furthermore,

the plight of the film’s victims reveals the banality and fragility of a

bourgeois existence that stigmatizes the victims of science and technology,

thereby training the total population as agents of the “banality of evil.”

As with Omicron’s alien(ation), Tanin no kao literalizes estrangement

through the focus on the transformative, estranging psychological effect of

trauma. Like Omicron, Okuyama exists in a marginal space from which to

117  
 
 
observe the bourgeois sphere of illusions and disguised social relations. In one

stylized scene in a bustling German expatriate bar, the audience is treated to

disconcerting flashes of Nazi military insignia, revealing a paranoid

awareness of the horror hidden below prosperity’s seemingly benign surface.

John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966) also evokes bourgeois ennui

through the novum of radical plastic surgery. This medical achievement, the

product of a corporation called only “the company” in a Kafkaesque

transposition of state power onto modern American corporatism, enables

Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph)’s futile attempt to leave a loveless

marriage and unrewarding banking position to start over with a new identity

(and a new face, provided by Rock Hudson). Although Seconds, like Tanin no

kao, follows the narrative formula of a mad scientist story rather than a

futuristic dystopia, the dystopian potential it suggests is clear. Both tales rely

on the conceit of instrumental technocratic solutions’ inadequacy in the face

of modern spiritual dispossession. Despite their fantastic scientific,

technological, and organizational achievements, the technocratic experts of

“the company” cannot provide Arthur with the means to find happiness even

as a painter, a social role of his choosing rooted in the promise of individual

liberty and expression. Rather, Arthur chafes against the confines of this

social role as well, which seems an even more superficial existence typified by

vapid cocktail party conversations and frequent hedonist injunctions from his

118  
 
 
bohemian girlfriend Nora (Salome Jens).

The Perfect Prescription

If the dystopian films following 1984 (1956) appear strongly

countercultural, their interpretative inversions also contained a variety of

prescriptions. While many of the films appear to follow Horkheimer and

Adorno’s bleak conclusion that a closed ideological system of bourgeois

society contains no exit, a number of the Huxleyian types posit a Utopian

possibility of individual freedom even if the narrative only allows for a

glimmer of this impossible freedom to emerge before the film’s abrupt

conclusion. In its scene of snow falling on the brotherhood of Book People,

Fahrenheit 451 (1966) probably goes the farthest toward providing images of

freely chosen solidarity [Fig. 3.9], but like the similar scenes of fantasy

communism at the conclusions of Gas-s-s-s (1970) [Fig. 3.10] and The Bed-

Sitting Room (1969), it contains no sense of social reality and is furthermore

profoundly backward looking.

While the atomic disaster films can be criticized for offering “no

solution,” in the dystopia a solution often appears in the self-same bourgeois

values the film seemingly attempts to invert—from the return to

Enlightenment values represented by the literature in Fahrenheit 451 (1966)

to the sentimental, redemptive power of love in Alphaville (1965) and of

119  
 
 
human connection in PlayTime (1967). Even American critics responded

negatively to Godard’s apparent sentimentality in Alphaville, with Bowsley

Crowther for instance claiming “Mr. Godard’s conclusion that love—good old

love—conquers all is a curiously disappointing finishing for such an initially

promising film” (1965, 49), and John Thomas bemoaning the “weak spot in

Godard’s message,” that “he can offer as an alternative . . . nothing more than

a return to the past” (1966, 50-51).

Fig. 3.9: A Book Person from Fahrenheit 451 (1966) returns to freely chosen
manual labor.  
 
 

120  
 
 
 Fig. 3.10: In Gas-s-s-s (1970), worldwide catastrophe ends in hippie communalism.
 
 
Contrary to these accusations of sentimentality, I find the “solutions”

offered in these films far more complex and contradictory upon further

thought, in keeping with the satirical tradition of Utopian fiction [which, as

Simon Dentith notes, may “shift rapidly in and out of (irony)” (1995, 139)]. In

Fahrenheit 451, for instance, books (in all their fetishistic wonder) ironically

break the spell of commodification in Fahrenheit 451 when the Book People

repurpose canonical literary classics freed from canon (as literal “textual

poachers”). Whether or not Godard’s romanticism can be considered entirely

sincere (or whether the love he advocates is “good old love”), the apparent

substitution of naivety for “concrete solutions” this “love” represents would

121  
 
 
increasingly emerge as a theme in the dystopian films as images of the sixties

youth counterculture began to enter their purview. If, in Seconds (1966), the

bohemian artists and revelers surrounding Tony (the transformed Arthur)

[Fig. 3.11] appear to represent a naïve anti-intellectual hedonism, a

cartoonish caricature of hippies, youth, and counterculture figures would

escalate after the so-called Summer of Love in 1967.

In yet another future of conformity, consumerism, and precise rational

control, Work Is a 4-Letter Word (1968) (from Royal Shakespeare Company’s

artistic director Peter Hall) tells the story of Valentine Brose (David Warner),

an oddball iconoclast who cannot even seem to manage his half-hour a day

janitorial job, instead creating outrageous bungles and placing his superiors

in embarrassing situations. In the film’s conclusion, similar to the endings of

The Bed-Sitting Room and Gas-s-s-s, representatives of each institutional

culture he has offended (including the management, the middle-

management, science, the church, and the family) converge on Valentine in a

giant, old-fashioned chase scene that culminates in a mass exposure to the

hallucinogenic spores of Valentine’s “giant Mexican mushrooms.” The

mushrooms affect an immediate about-face in this small microcosm of society,

which degenerates into a hedonistic mushroom-eating orgy of laughter. Their

final act is the destruction of a giant computer, which the party applauds. As

in the other films with escape endings including Fahrenheit 451, the

122  
 
 
conclusion features Valentine and his wife Betty (Cilla Black) venturing off

into a forest, representing a return to the “natural world.”

If youth culture often represented a “danger” in British popular

culture, These Are the Damned (1964) had united members of a rebellious

motorcycle gang as part of the film’s final “nuclear family.” Peter Watkins’s

Privilege (1967), by contrast, portrays the ease with which even “normal” and

political engaged youths become the willing sheep of a media-concocted false

messiah espousing conformism as long as he provides a steady stream of

vapid pop music and fits in with appealing youth fads and fashions. (A

contemporary review in The Christian Science Monitor found Watkins’s satire

plausible: “a thoughtful look at today’s super-adoration of pop-music singers

makes director Watkins’ [sic] chilling premise more believable” [Sweeney

1967, 6]). AIP’s hippiesploitation satire Wild in the Streets (1968) would

further explore the threat (or exciting promise) of irrationality within an

ascendant and fashion-driven mass youth culture, as a 15-year-old voting age

results in “re-education camps” of compulsory LSD for the over-40s and the

establishment of “the most truly hedonistic society the world has ever

known.”

123  
 
 
 Fig. 3.11: In Seconds, Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson) finds a literal Bacchanal no less
alienating than his old life as banker Arthur Hamilton.
 
 
 
If these films collectively satirize the notion of a countercultural

solution to the Huxleyian dystopian future, New Left filmmaker Robert

Harris’s Ice (1970) provides an overtly political countercultural response to

the dystopian future from within the Movement, depicting the role of a

Newsreel-type radical media collective in the struggle against a repressive

future state. While distinct from the film’s commercial future dystopias, Ice

nevertheless provides a formal and visual strategy that resonates with the

earlier films, including the use of contemporary New York City as a stand-in

for the future, which reveals the fascist character of many contemporaneous

124  
 
 
situations including depictions of police brutality. In addition, the narrative

is broken up by a number of Brechtian estrangement techniques, including

on-screen text [Fig. 3.12] and negative images [Fig. 3.13].

Fig. 3.12: An explicit statement of Marxist Utopian negation in Ice (1970)

 

125  
 
 
 Fig. 3.13: In Ice (1970), negation is also represented formally through the use of
negative images.

Techniques such as these clearly mobilize sf cognitive estrangement to

marry political theater to the rhetorical appeals of technological Utopianism.

However, in doing so the film also moves away from the decade’s

meticulously developed Huxleyian future of soft rational-scientific control

(delineated above) in favor of the obviously repressive, imperialist police state

of 1984 in which a clear struggle can be outlined between a mass proletarian

population (of “whites” aligned with blacks, women, and “Spanish-speaking

126  
 
 
peoples” as well as the occupied country of Mexico) and a ruling-class

imperialist state. This opens up the space for a renewed critique of scientific-

technological rationality, as Amos Vogel’s Village Voice review, suggests:

Vogel notes that as the film goes on, “all talk about ideas and causes has been

superseded by discussions of tactics and terror, as if the revolution was

merely a matter of efficient technology” (1970, 57). In this way, the

revolutionaries may even appear to represent the technocratic avant-garde.

In a more ambiguous (though equally estranged fashion), David

Cronenberg’s early films Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970)

further present a future rational-technocracy (seemingly modeled after

figures such as Marshall McLuhan and Timothy Leary) in the service of

“free[ing] energies, possibilities, and new forms of human relationship never

dreamed of,” including communities of telepaths (in Stereo) and a society

transformed by a mutant sexually transmitted disease that functions like a

drug (in Crimes of the Future).23 Equally ambiguous would be the more

celebrated and notorious A Clockwork Orange (1971), which utilized graphic

sex and violence to pose the question of what constitutes a radical

                                                                                                               
23 Because of the relative obscurity of these films it is unclear how they were viewed
in the era, though in a review of Cronenberg’s Rabid (1977) for Screen International
Geoff Brown notes the director’s exploitation films become “more palatable” if they
are considered as “diluted” commercial variations of the earlier films’ “concerns with
man’s physical nature and tamperings of science” (1977, 18).

127  
 
 
countercultural act in a Huxleyian future,24 while also serving to challenge

(or at least complicate) the radical individualist libertarianism that had

united Orwell, Huxley, and Marcuse in its vision of youthful freedom decayed

into anomic “ultraviolence.”

As Janet Staiger’s (2000) study of A Clockwork Orange’s U.S. reception

reveals, central to the film’s near-universal controversy was the question of

the film’s ultimate “meaning” and what it advocated. I suggest that A

Clockwork Orange reveals how liberal-consensus over the bomb, which had

dominated sf half a decade earlier in films such as Dr. Strangelove: or How I

Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, had given way to

fragmentation amid the larger question of optimism toward progress,

represented by the decade’s trend toward films of Huxleyian dystopia. In

doing so, however, A Clockwork Orange appears to fracture the notion of a

hegemonic ideology—at the very least, its own reception provided an

ideological battlefield on which the opposing ideologies viewers read into its

text could contend. A Clockwork Orange, like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968),

Planet of the Apes (1968), and other films of the late sixties and early

seventies seemed finally to wrench Enlightenment notions of progress and

evolution from their ideological determinations in order to interrogate

                                                                                                               
24 Vinyl, Andy Warhol’s earlier 1965 adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, also raises
this question by drawing out parallels between “control” and sexual sadomasochism.

128  
 
 
critically whether history, if it is a meaningful concept, can ultimately be

understood at all.

Jameson asks us to imagine an alternative in which the “Utopian

future has in no other words turned out to have been merely the future of one

moment of what is now our own past” (1982, 152). This perspective provides

an insight into the strangely furtive movements toward Utopia represented

by Alphaville, Fahrenheit 451, and THX-1138’s profoundly unimaginative

“final escapes,” as well as the dystopias with no solution at all, including A

Clockwork Orange. The inability to imagine the future receives perhaps its

clearest possible representation in 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the monolith

beacon representing an almost literal “blank spot” in the frame.

129  
 
 
Chapter Four: Exploration

If today it has become a cliché to describe the cinema of the sixties as

“revolutionary,” few critics think of this claim in connection to the spirit of

political revolution. Peter Cowie does so when he begins his Revolution! The

Explosion of World Cinema in the 60s (2004) by rooting the May ’68 protests

in the milieu of the French New Wave and the controversy surrounding the

dismissal of Henri Langlois from the Cinémathèque Française. David E.

James (1989) presents the experimental films of the American Underground

as radically iconoclastic and representing a formal and ideological challenge

to the sociopolitical order. More often, however, the sixties film “revolution”

may be seen as representing the end of an “old” and the beginning of a “new”

commercial cinema represented by both the European New Waves and New

Hollywood.1

                                                                                                               
1 Mark Harris for instance elicits this sense of “revolution” with the title of his
history of the 1967 birth of New Hollywood Pictures at a Revolution. For Harris and
others, the mid-sixties creation of films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The
Graduate (1968) represented not only the industrial re-organization and “death” of
the studio system but also a period of artistic success through which Hollywood
pushed past an era of censorship, in the process incorporating the non-Classical
techniques, narrative modes, and stylistic tendencies pioneered by the post-war
European art cinema and cinematic avant-garde, even perhaps advancing and
perfecting them on a technical level.

130  
 
 
 When assessing the New Hollywood from a critical studies standpoint,

however, this “revolution” can begin to appear by contrast as a meaningless

coup d’état by a new generation of culture-savvy marketers and executives.

For Thomas Doherty, for instance, films such as The Graduate and Easy

Rider (1969) may be seen as products resulting from an adjustment of the

teenpic exploitation formula, cynically designed to meet a burgeoning

counterculture market (2002, 191-192).2 For James, the use, or appropriation,

of alternative film practices within this commercial setting ultimately had

the effect of co-opting and therefore de-radicalizing their potentially radical

impact. Mark Even Harris’s own narrative of the period reveals the

precarious and seemingly arbitrary ebb and flow of the era’s aesthetic

preoccupations and trends (Harris 2008, 136-137).

In Chapters Two and Three, I described sixties films that exemplify

the two socially critical sf sub-genres Raymond Williams calls Doomsday and

Putropia. In “Science Fiction,” Williams remains skeptical of both these

types, considering the novels 1984 (1949) and Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

politically regressive myths first and foremost. Because “Humanism is

discarded in the very affirmation of the familiar contemporary myths of

                                                                                                               
2 The growing legitimation of genres previously deemed exploitation might also be
seen as indicative of a general upgrading of the cultural status of the film medium in
America (Bauman 2007).

131  
 
 
humane concern,” Williams claims, “Much SF is really anti-SF” (1988, 359).3

His analysis of these sub-genres is therefore something of a precursor to the

slightly later critiques of sf cinema offered by Richard Hodgens and Susan

Sontag, for whom sci-fi is symptomatic of the culture’s intellectual banality

rather than an oppositional response to it.

I have, however, suggested a Utopian interpretation of these forms,

derived from Fredric Jameson and Tom Moylan. In the doomsdays, the

bomb’s negation banishes the anti-Utopian status quo and opens up the

conceptual possibility of renewal. Dystopias, by contrast, provide a useful

critical complication to this premise by unmasking the constitutive

imaginative impoverishment entailed in such a purely negative

interpretation of the “technological” present. As Jameson theorizes:

. . . [W]hat [sf] is indeed authentic about, as a

mode of narrative and a form of knowledge, is not
our capacity to keep the future alive, even in
imagination. On the contrary, its deepest vocation
is over and over again to demonstrate and to
dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future, to
body forth, through apparently full representations
which prove on closer inspection to be structurally
                                                                                                               
3 Statements such as this in “Science Fiction” (as well as Williams’s very use of the
term “Putropia” which, unlike “dystopia,” contains “Utopia”) reveal Williams at his
most dialectical, re-affirming the theoretical relations between sf theory and
Hegelian-Marxist critique.

132  
 
 
 and constitutively impoverished, the atrophy in our
time of what Marcuse called the utopian
imagination, the imagination of otherness and
radical difference; to succeed by failure, and to
serve as unwitting and even unwilling vehicles for
a meditation, which, setting forth for the unknown,
finds itself irrevocably mired in the all-too-familiar,
and thereby becomes transformed into a
contemplation of our own absolute limits. (2005,
289-290)

Inasmuch as the disasters and dystopias dramatize the squandering of

humanity’s technological and scientific progress, they do not attempt the

sincere confrontation with the absolute limits of science, technology, or

humans. In this way, Williams is correct to claim that both sub-genres are

“anti-sf.” Nevertheless, the dystopian gesture provides a movement toward

the consideration of “limits” by revealing a limited imagination as

symptomatic of squandered human potential.

Williams contrasts these two conservative forms with the progressive

Space Anthropology stories “which consciously use[s] the SF formula to find

what are essentially new tribes, and new patterns of living” (1988, 359). In

the late sixties, after a period dominated by dystopian stories (Booker 2001,

83; Fitting 2010, 140; Franklin 1966, 391), Utopian sf would begin to re-

emerge in the literary field, and this tendency was paralleled in cinema. The

133  
 
 
prestige disaster films I have described aggregate around 1959-1964, art

cinematic dystopias dominate the mid-decade, and art cinematic exploration

stories increasingly emerge during the heyday of the counterculture in the

late sixties. By 1968 when Alain Resnais’s Je t’aime je t’aime was set to open

the Cannes Film Festival (but was ultimately interrupted by Mai ’68 in all its

historical immediacy), it was a film of this third type.

In this chapter, I will therefore examine the era’s exploration films as a

final test of the revolutionary potential of sixties sf cinema, i.e. order to

consider the confrontations with “our own absolute limits” (Jameson 205,

289). In these years of social strife, the exploration of human limits would be

increasingly allegorized through liberatory discourses circling around themes

of race, gender, sexuality and “consciousness expansion.” After describing the

fifties space exploration sub-genre as an especially ideological form centered

on the establishment of outer space as a hegemonic space, I will note two

progressive sixties counter-tendencies. I will begin by exploring films that

address the notion of an “expanded consciousness” that seeks to burrow

behind the ideological limits of surface reality. In the next section on “space

camp and sexual evolution” I return to the topic of gender representations in

order to bring out the ways in which the undermining of assumptions about

gender ultimately provided the more profitable framework for exploring “new

tribes, and new patterns of living.” If drugs represent the notion of an

134  
 
 
expanded paradigm on a theoretical level, sex represents the practical

laboratory within which this expansion is tested.

Hegemonic Space

The prolific and formulaic space exploration plot had begun in the

fifties with the rocket ship films Destination Moon (1950) and Rocketship X-M

(1950) but continued throughout the sixties, albeit often as fodder for

International “B” production in Italy (the films of Antonio Margheriti) and

Japan (Kinji Fukasaku).4 Hollywood studios pursued a few large prestige

space exploration films, despite a general reluctance to do so (Harris 2008,

285). Robinson Crusoe On Mars (1964), a large production by independent

producer Aubrey Schenk for distribution by Paramount, was solidly in the

established George Pal style of family films such as Conquest of Space (1955)

whereas Countdown (1968) and Marooned (1969) would also remain faithful

to the fifties formula while predicting the seventies tendency to re-imagine

the sub-genre in a more realistic, less fanciful style. The Martian Chronicles

was to have been a large production for Universal by producer Alan Pakula

and director Robert Mulligan, collaborators on a series of social dramas

including To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), and thereby may well have provided

                                                                                                               
4 Low-budget sf production also began to dominate filmmaking in countries largely
outside the sphere of Hollywood such as Mexico and Spain.

135  
 
 
a better analogue to the newer sf types such as On the Beach (1959) or even

Fahrenheit 451 (1966) (Variety June 28, 1965, 11). Arthur Jacob’s troubled

production of Planet of the Apes (1968) seems to have been pitched as a full-

fledged social satire replacing modern cities with ape denizens in the manner

of its French source novel but consequently had difficulty finding full funding

until it was a given a chance by Richard Zanuck (by which time its scenario

had been greatly compressed) (Variety March 25, 1964, 3; Russo and

Landsman 2001, 2-3). Although still dominated by the bomb, and therefore

evocative of all three of sixties generic types, Planet of the Apes deviates from

the fifties space exploration cycle by making its focus the elaboration of the

ape society.5 In this way, it prefigures a series of large budgeted seventies

“Spaceship Earth” films including Silent Running (1972) and Soylent Green

(1973) that would evolve past a fixation on atomic fears in order to consider

human progress through appeals to nature and multiculturalism but always

from within a pessimistic framework informed by a growing awareness of

environmental crisis and degradation.

I consider Barbarella (1968) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) the key

space exploration films of the era because they most boldly invert the fifties

                                                                                                               
5 Joe Russo and Larry Landsman reference a memo from Jacobs to Blake Edwards
reading “I absolutely concur with you that the last scene should end with a
nightmare quality—no hope—that Thomas [later, Taylor] should not say: ‘This is
Earth,’ but that we should see it in the last shocking shot (2001, 20).”

136  
 
 
genre expectations through the use of art cinematic and avant-garde

technique. In doing so, they reveal the extent to which the space exploration

film can be understood as “the astronaut film” because they focus on the

character of the astronaut as the avatar of space conquest. In the sixties,

therefore, the confrontation with progress began with the bomb itself, was

then followed by a consideration of the bomb-producing society as a whole,

and finally concluded in the consideration of the astronaut.

The fifties astronaut films had predominately concerned white males

and thereby provide the fodder for a consideration (and potential inversion of)

hegemonic sexual and racial assumptions. In the domain of gender roles, the

rocket itself is a rather obviously phallic contraption penetrating the

unknown depths of space, but it is not uncommon for these films to represent

gender contrasts as the major source of narrative interest, as the presence of

a female scientist or girlfriend often complicates the Hawksian male

camaraderie of the rocket’s masculine realm. In these films, the women are

either a source of comic relief, frivolous and vain, or else frustratingly cool,

unfeminine, and inscrutable, as in the case of scientist Lisa Van Horn (Osa

Massen) in Rocketship X-M.

137  
 
 
 Although it combines the space exploration formula with that of a

“weirdie” monster scenario,6 the British-produced First Man Into Space

(1959) epitomizes the astronaut films’ gender relations. It begins in medias

res at a naval base in Albuquerque with a rocket launch into the ionosphere,

meticulously detailed in the film’s opening ten-minute sequence. Hotshot

navy test pilot Lt. Dan Milton Prescott (Bill Edwards) attempts to control the

rocket Y12 out past the ionosphere, attentive to the directions of his brother,

Cmdr. Charles Ernest Prescott (Marshall Thompson) and the pensive

German scientist Dr. Von Essen (Carl Jaffe) on the ground. Dan is

alternately wrung with pressure [Fig. 4.1] and elated at his achievement. He

then appears to falter and even briefly loses consciousness before safely

ejecting himself and finally making it out alive.

                                                                                                               
6 A similar variation is found in The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and Terrore nello
spazio (Planet of the Vampires, 1965).

138  
 
 
 Fig. 4.1: A pensive Lt. Dan (Bill Edwards) on the verge of becoming the First Man
Into Space (1959)

As Dan recuperates, his brother chastises his missteps during the

mission. However, due to popular and official pressure, it is clear that Dan

will be piloting the next rocket mission in only a few weeks. Dan’s Italian

“scientist in a skirt” girlfriend Tia (Marla Landi) distracts him from his

preparation, but as the second launch approaches he appears to be physically

and mentally rejuvenated. During the launch, however, Dan decides again to

disobey his brother’s orders and to strike out into outer space without

139  
 
 
permission. Then something weird happens, and a thick cloud of “meteorite

dust” begins to assault the X13 rocket.

At this point, Dan is presumed dead. But two more weird situations

emerge for the remaining company. When the capsule returns to earth, it is

covered with a strange alien coating that even X-Rays cannot penetrate. If

this is not strange enough, a vampiric monster has begun to terrorize the

New Mexican countryside, upsetting the region’s poor Mexican farmers by

slaughtering cattle before moving on to murder and ravenously thieve blood

banks. Of course, the monster was Dan all along, transformed by the alien

dust [Fig. 4.2], which protects anyone and anything in the vacuum of outer

space but in doing so significantly alters its host. Weak from oxygen

deprivation, Dan had reverted to an animal bloodlust. Before finally

collapsing, Dan gives an impassioned, disconnected final speech. Despite the

awful anxiety of “groping [his] way through fear and doubt,” he “just had to

be the first man into space.” His brother eulogizes the fallen astronaut with

the sentiment that “The conquest of new worlds always makes demands of

human life, and there will always be men who accept the risks.”

140  
 
 
Fig. 4.2: Lt. Dan (Bill Edwards) post-transformation in First Man Into Space (1959)

If 2001: A Space Odyssey emblematizes the era’s movement toward the

aesthetic traditions of “art cinema,” First Man Into Space is fairly

straightforward post-Sputnik “B” sci-fi. In all of the ways 2001: A Space

Odyssey seems ambiguous and complex, First Man Into Space is clear and

deliberate. However, First Man Into Space offers something of 2001: A Space

Odyssey’s formula scaffolding in all its radical banality and cheesy

obviousness. Both focus on the figure of man flung into the future through

the exploration of outer space. Both also see man evolve through literal

141  
 
 
transformation. Finally, in both cases, “man” is unequivocally an Anglo-

American male, paralleling the era’s dominant ideology. Invoking the

common phrase “the future of ‘mankind’,” Jenny Andersson notes that this

sixties paradigm was hegemonic, monolithic, and unfettered by “global

cultures, development and peace, and women and minority groups” (2012,

1413).7 Furthermore, as Michelle Reid notes, colonialism is often seen as a

fundamental component of several seminal sf stories. John Rieder for

instance sees sf as intrinsically linked to a colonial “myth of destiny, agency,

and progress” while Istvan Ciscnery-Ronay Jr. claims that sf further helps to

justify “the project of a global, technoscientific empire” (Reid 2009, 258).

Gene Youngblood calls 2001: A Space Odyssey “a technical

masterpiece, but a thematic mishmash of nineteenth- and twentieth-century

confusions, which demonstrates that it is not so much a film of tomorrow as a

trenchant reflection of contemporary sentiments solidly based in the

consciousness of today” (1970, 139-140). Nevertheless, Youngblood views this

consciousness as fundamentally techno-Utopian, isolating in the film “a new

nostalgia” for the sacred and existential, that is, a new Romanticism seeking

inner as well as outer exploration (1970, 142-146). As a product of nineteenth

                                                                                                               
7 Andersson claims that it was only in the 1980s and 1990s that this paradigm
opened “as a wide range of questions from feminism, peace studies, and
environmentalism entered into the futurological field” (2012, 1423).

142  
 
 
and twentieth-century ideological structures, however, it should come as no

surprise that the legacy of Eurocentric patriarchy would color this vision so

that, for instance, 2001: A Space Odyssey reveals through their structured

absence a dearth of non-white, non-male human perspectives. Likewise,

although it can be easily read as a critique of technocracy (after all, the

technocrats are in the dark throughout), 2001: A Space Odyssey additionally

frames space exploration from a largely imperialist perspective. After all, the

Übermenschen from Jupiter and beyond appear to plant their monolith like a

flag on the moon and impart their wisdom via a form of benevolent

paternalism. Youngblood notes that the film is rich with Romantic sexual

symbolism, but I would add that its “insemination” symbolism is hardly

gender neutral:

Encompassing the whole is the sexual/genetic

metaphor in which rockets are ejaculated from the
central slit in Hilton Space Station No. 5, and a
sperm-shaped spacecraft named Discovery (i.e.,
birth) emits a pod that carries its human seed
through a Stargate womb to eventual death and
rebirth as the Starchild embryo. (1970, 140)8

                                                                                                               
8 Judith A. Spector (1981) gives a counter-reading of 2001 as an example of “womb-
envy.”

143  
 
 
 Of course, 2001: A Space Odyssey remains an eminently polysemous

art cinematic text due to its marriage of narrative and tonal ambiguity with a

ceaseless parade of portentous if enigmatic symbols. In First Man Into Space,

by comparison, the vision of space travel as an extension of white male

dominance is completely transparent, beginning with its initial Janus-like

characterization of gender. Astronaut Lt. Dan is a dashing, driven,

domineering playboy, while Italian “scientist in a skirt” Tia submissively

delights in her pursuit. Additionally, a racial hierarchy is established, with

Mexicans stereotyped throughout as inferior, underdeveloped racial others.

For instance, a Mexican official (Roger Delgado) objects to the Navy’s rocket

project because part of Y13 falling from the sky interfered with a ceremonial

bullfight. The scientists specify that the bloodsucker has attacked “a Mexican

cow,” which is revealed to be the property of a sombrero-wearing wretch

(Barry Shawzin), and even though Lt. Dan is the murderous killer and

monster responsible, his transfiguration is justified as ultimately necessary

for “the conquest of new worlds” and as being, after all, only a “natural”

expression of “the instinct to stay alive.”

Robinson Crusoe On Mars (1964) is also staunchly beholden to the

mythos of white male dominance, combining features of the rugged American

pioneer tale with the benevolent white savior myth. As the name suggests,

Robinson Crusoe On Mars is a story of survival through human ingenuity on

144  
 
 
Mars, where astronaut Christopher “Kit” Draper (Paul Mantee) and his pet

monkey Mona are stranded when a meteor collides with an American rocket

ship. After Kit learns to survive on an improbably plentiful Mars, evoking the

myth of the American frontiersman (with its “forgetting” of thousands of

Native American cultivators) he discovers that the planet is the site of

mining operations by an advanced interstellar alien civilization who use as

their slave-labor aliens who resemble stereotypical Natives [Fig. 4.3]. One

such fugitive slave (Victor Lundin) easily becomes Friday to Kit’s Robinson

Crusoe, and never is there any doubt that Kit will be Friday’s master nor

that “Friday” will be forced to learn English rather than vice versa. Almost

immediately, Friday willingly gives his undying allegiance to Kit, even

withholding his oxygen pills so that Kit can have more in an almost

Griffithian moment of Old South melodrama. Likewise, in Planet of the Apes

(1968), the gagging of astronaut George Taylor (Charlton Heston) is

presented as a form of torture, yet the screenplay ensures his love interest

Nova (Linda Harrison, also dressed in Native regalia) is made completely

mute. In both examples, progress and masculine domination are presented as

mutually constituting.

Both Jameson (2005, 289) and Peter Fitting (2010, 143) have suggested

that the influence of feminist-inspired sf literature such as Ursula LaGuin’s

The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) was largely responsible for the return of a

145  
 
 
Utopian impulse in literary sf in the late sixties. However, within the

cinematic field, a feminist impulse is not especially apparent as a

countertendency to the popularity of the male-dominated astronaut genre.

Female astronauts were still more absent from sixties sf film than in the

fifties cycle. Only Barbarella provides a counterpoint, along with a number of

feminist constituents, including a future without penetrative sexual

intercourse (and with sexual release for all). However, both Lisa Park (1999)

and Barry Keith Grant (2006) dispute its status as a feminist text, with

Grant claiming that it epitomizes the sf tendency of privileging “the

patriarchal gaze and objectification of the female body” (2006, 85). Although

the patriarchal gaze is a feature of Classical filmmaking generally, it can also

be seen as an extension of the sf genre’s tendency toward visual colonization,

which Vivian Sobchack calls the “’I came—I saw—I conquered visual

movement” (1999, 98).9 In this reading, Barbarella and Robinson Crusoe on

Mars would appear to abide by the same formal logic of domination, only to

different degrees.

                                                                                                               
9 Another example would be Raquel Welch’s interchangeability as scientist in
Fantastic Voyage (1966) and cave girl in One Million B.C. (1966), both of which for
some reason dictate skin-tight garments.

146  
 
 
 Fig. 4.3: Freed from slavery, Friday (Victor Lundin) willingly offers his services to
American Kit Draper (Paul Mantee) in Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964).

Although 2001: A Space Odyssey provides the coordinates of

masculinity, logocentrism, and colonization rather more ambiguously than

First Man Into Space and Robinson Crusoe On Mars, a critical attention to

the film’s identity politics nonetheless marked its reception. Concerning race,

for instance, a contemporaneous letter to the editors of The Los Angeles

Times notes, “ . . . All the characters are white. Stanley Kubrick is certainly

not presenting us with a completely utopian view of the future” (Stapenhorst

1968, C4). In her New Yorker review of the film, Penelope Gilliat similarly

remarks, “There are no Negroes in this vision of America’s space program”

(1968, 150). Relating this absence to the film’s evolutionary trajectory, Adilifu

Nama argues the reading that the “structured absence of blackness presents

147  
 
 
a clear binary coding of race and suggests that nonwhites are primitive

simian predecessors of modern humanity” (2008, 12).10

Gender provides an especially visible context for the film’s critical

reception, with a “gender gap” even apparent in its contemporaneous

reviews.11 While Kubrick claims in promotional material that in 2001: A

Space Odyssey “all human mythology—which certainly expresses the

yearnings of mass psychology—reaches [an] ultimate state” (Kubrick, quoted

in Kloman 1968, D15), New York Times reviewer Renata Adler sees only “the

apotheosis of the fantasy of a precocious, early nineteen fifties city boy” (1968,

58):

                                                                                                               
10 One may speculate that the cultural influence of Star Trek (1966-1969)
encouraged audiences to expect a diverse cast of astronauts. However, while Star
Trek may be considered a “confrontation” with the lone-male astronaut, many fans
were left starved for an even more minority representation (Nama 2008, 3). Despite
the limited multiculturalism of Star Trek, Lynn Spigel argues that the space race
was itself “predicated on racist and sexist barriers that effectively grounded ‘racially’
marked Americans and women in general” (1997, 47-48). Spigel claims that this
racism was epitomized by the “white flight” of the The Jetsons (1962-1963), which
dreamed of “expanding white suburbia and its middle-class, consumer-oriented life
into the reaches of outer space” (1997, 49). Nevertheless, Spigel notes even in The
Jetsons a potential for subversion in that “the space age family was often
represented in ways that made the traditional rules of family life seem oddly out of
step with the times” (1997, 57).
11 R. Barton Palmer’s 2006 study of the film’s critical reception considers reception
divided on the basis of a “generation gap” alone and does not note this gender gap.

148  
 
 
 The whole sensibility is intellectual fifties child:
Chess games, body building exercises, beds on the
spacecraft that look like camp bunks, other beds
that look like Egyptian mummies, Richard Strauss
music, time games, Strauss waltzes, Howard
Johnson’s, birthday phone calls. In their space
uniforms, the voyagers look like Jiminy Crickets.
When they want to be let out of the craft they say,
“Pod bay doors open,” as one might say “Bomb bay
doors open” in every movie out of World War II.

Washington Post reviewer Richard L. Coe’s contentious response is

found in his second review of the film, entitled “’2001’ Flings Man Into

Space”:

As we came out of 2001: A Space Odyssey [sic], my

wife remarked: “Now we’ve seen a movie about how
the moon is made of green cheese.”

Still reeling from my marvelously exciting journey

through space and time, I didn’t grasp the depth of
her import. She is a bright girl given to saucy
nutshells but her tone suggested she meant it as a
critique.

. . . [H]ers proved the first of many cracks and I

have yet to find a woman who shared my
enjoyment of Stanley Kubrick’s spectacular and

149  
 
 
 wonderful adventure . . .

Mrs. Martin proved cool, Miss Ohliger caustic and

Miss Beale sniffed in outrage: “Stuff for seven-year-
olds.”

Now as it happens, two ladies have just taken over

film reviewing for two of our most influential
journals. At this writing Pauline Kael’s views have
yet to appear in The New Yorker [sic], but Renata
Adler, characteristically found an ingenious line of
contempt in The New York Times [sic]. “2001,” she
snipped, seemed to her the product of someone
brought up in the 1950s.

I do find that as devastating a remark as Mrs.

Coe’s about green cheese. (1968, E3)

I have reproduced long portions from this review if only because Coe’s

response seems to underscore rather than refute the limited, adolescent male

perspective Adler sees underlying Kubrick’s grandiose “human mythology.”12

Ultimately, Kael would in fact pan 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In a 1968 interview for The East Village Eye, Kubrick would finally

weigh in on the film’s lack of women: “Well, you obviously aren’t going to put
                                                                                                               
12 Coe even patronizingly “advocates” for female critics in face of those who think it
is not “cricket” (1968, E3).

150  
 
 
a woman on the crew” (Kohler 2002, 250). Nevertheless, several subsequent

analyses would attempt to present 2001: A Space Odyssey as largely critical

of gender norms. Grant, for instance, argues that Kubrick’s film “purposefully

undermine[s]” a “sensibility of masculine mastery, as conveyed in popular

culture’s representations of space travel” (2006, 80) by subjecting sf tropes of

phallic power to systematic visual disorientation and narrative irresolution.

Ellis Hanson similarly notes that the design of many of the film’s symbols

(including the Discovery and monoliths) can be read as both masculine and

feminine (1993, 142-143) and that “despite the triumphant tone of the final

frames, Kubrick’s attempt at narrative closure remains troubling and

ambiguous,” thus potentially queer (1993, 149). Finally, Friedrich Kittler

provides an analysis of the film in which the violent colonial imperative of the

film’s alien gods should properly be re-imagined in the form of a viral

infection, in keeping with William S. Burroughs’s dictum that “language is a

virus from outer space” (2012, 423).

Hanson notes an astonishing number of specifically gay interpretations

of the character HAL (voiced by Douglas Rain) in prominent critical sources

(1993, 140). For instance, Newsweek reviewer Joseph Morgenstern cheekily

claims that the film’s Discovery sequence provides “a long, long stretch of

very shaky comedy-melodrama in which the computer turns on its crew and

carries on like an injured party in a homosexual spat” (1968, 100). While

151  
 
 
Hanson and Dominic Janes (2011) attempt comprehensive interpretations of

the film’s queer resonances,13 the sixties critical consensus of HAL’s

queerness (described as everything from “ambiguous” to “hysterical” to

outright “faggoty”) seems to me above all based in his fulfilling audience

expectations of coded gay representations (Hanson 1993, 140). HAL thereby

resonates with Harry Benshoff’s description of horror and sf characters that

“[ooze] a gay camp aura” (1997, 50).14 I would further argue that those critics

who read HAL as “hysterical,” “fussy,” “androgynous,” “rejected,” and “like a

mother” (Hanson 1993, 140) could easily be describing the icy Lisa Van Horn

of Rocketship X-M, that is, responding to the generic expectation that space

exploration pertains to gender contrasts. Although “you obviously aren’t

going to put a woman on the crew,” her presence is still needed. HAL
                                                                                                               
13 Hanson attempts an extended psychoanalytic reading of the film as queer based in
the “narcissism inherent in man’s love for his own machinery” that Bowman
attempts to deny by murdering HAL (1993, 148). Janes (2011) provides a litany of
queer resonances in 2001: A Space Odyssey predicated on an understanding of
Arthur C. Clarke as gay. Yet another queer reading can be found in the chapter
concerning 2001: A Space Odyssey in Patrick Webster’s monograph on Kubrick
(2010, 44-66). Margaret DeRosia (2003) discusses of a homosexual subtext in A
Clockwork Orange and George Linden (1977) unpacks a sexual subtext in Dr.
Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb that including
a veiled homosexuality.
14 According to Benshoff, the gay monster (coded by necessity) is posited as a needed
“other” within cinema’s straight, sexist ideology but ultimately becomes a figure for
a vicarious identification due to the “lure of the deviant” (1997, 13).

152  
 
 
therefore again calls attention to the centrality of gender and identity politics

in the space exploration sub-genre.

Outer and Inner Space

If the anxious consciousness of HAL’s coded queerness marked 2001: A

Space Odyssey (1968)’s critical reception, the notion of “consciousness

expansion” through drugs provided perhaps the most overt popular cultural

frame for considering the film’s extraordinary explorations. Such rhetoric was

reflected, for instance, in the advertising that sold 2001: A Space Odyssey as

the “ultimate trip,” a campaign which Benshoff claims began “after the studio

became aware that some audience members were getting high and/or

dropping acid in order to experience the film in a heightened sensory state”

(2001, 32).

Throughout this dissertation, I have attempted to show the cultural

and formal links between sf allegories and the twentieth-century aesthetic

methods of estrangement (which attempted to make ideological obfuscations

manifest, most prominently within Brechtian theater). Timothy Leary’s

hippie utopianism similarly relied on the notion of psychedelic hallucinatory

drugs as a subversive estrangement-agent (“Turn on, tune in, drop out”).

That is, if “consciousness expansion” functioned in the sixties context as a

default framework for expanding conceptual horizons, psychedelics became

153  
 
 
an easy representational proxy for the ongoing process of conceptual revision

(as metaphorically unlocking the “doors of perception” to use Aldous Huxley’s

phrase). In THX-1138 (1971), a retinue of Soma-like drugs provides the basis

for social control. In Work Is a Four-Letter Word (1968) and Gas-s-s-s (1970)

liberatory hallucinogens act as a panacea, liberating individuals to see

through their ideological blinders.

In several of the era’s sf films, a drug provides the story’s novum. In

Roger Corman’s X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963), eye drops provide Dr.

James Xavier (Ray Milland) with superhuman vision that allows him to

eventually see “an eye that sees us all” at the center of the universe. And if

Dr. X would rather blind himself than confront such limits, Paul Groves

(Peter Fonda) of Corman’s later The Trip (1967) is more ambivalent about the

experience of LSD, reflecting the changing times. In The Trip, Paul often

seems to venture through an imagined past. In Robert Benayoun’s Paris

n’existe pas (1969), however, the film’s protagonist Simon (Richard Leduc)

seems to become literally “unstuck in time” [like Kurt Vonnegut’s protagonist

Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)] after smoking marijuana,

venturing back and forth between the past, present, and future.

Whereas 20th-Century Fox’s Fantastic Voyage (1966) would explore

“inner space” by literally shrinking a crew of doctors and scientists to save

the life of a comatose doctor (Jan Benes), Paris n’existe pas (1969) and Je

154  
 
 
t’aime je t’aime (1968) would delve into the exploration of mental states in

order to address the more elusive topics of free will and being-in-time. In

doing so, both films update Chris Marker’s La jetée (1962), as the novum of

time-travel is now presented as a form of expanded consciousness.

The story of Je t’aime je t’aime concerns a suicidal young bourgeois

(Claude, played by Claude Rich), who is chosen to participate in a time travel

experiment that will take him back to a moment from his past. Instead, the

experiment malfunctions and he finds himself randomly bouncing back and

forth in between past instants, many of which focus on his relationship with

Catrine (Olga Georges-Picot). Through a paradoxical structure in which

sequences resonate simultaneously as fixed memories and opportunities to

“re-live” the past, we learn that Claude has attempted suicide as a response

to Catrine’s death, for which he may or may not have been responsible. In a

deviation from standard space and time travel films, which tend to treat the

explorer in a positive light, Claude’s re-living of the past increasingly reveals

him as condescending, petty, and chauvinistic toward Catrine. However, it is

unclear to what extent his own self-recrimination colors his vision of the past,

especially since his travels are transformed by hallucinations and surreal

juxtapositions. Ultimately, Claude’s progressively more disorienting time

jumping terminates in a second, successful, suicide attempt, the cause of

which is again ambiguous. In traveling back to the moment of his suicide,

155  
 
 
Claude may have inevitably repeated the action by virtue of some immutable

necessity. Or else, his journey back into its initial causes may have

represented the renewed impetus for voluntary suicide when the opportunity

again presented itself.

If space exploration stories such as First Man Into Space (1959) rely on

a radical presentation of individual agency in the pursuit of scientific

progress, Je t’aime je t’aime invokes through the estranging context of time

travel a science that renders volition itself rather abstruse. Claude cannot be

sure of which of his actions may have contributed to Catrine’s death nor is it

clear to what extent his return to random moments from his past may

provide the opportunity for the reversal of potentially fatal errors. Although

the contours of Claude’s philosophical enigma are rendered tangible through

a time-travel context, his out-of-time experience provides a framework

through which even such apparently natural phenomena as love, memory,

and time itself confound the possibility of radically autonomous individual

agency. Both Claude and Catrine are products of their experiences, largely

“controlled” by their individual emotional failings. An expanded

consciousness therefore serves to reveal individuals not as self-determining

agents but as fragile subjects swallowed up by time and historical

156  
 
 
contingency.15

Paris n’existe pas provides an additional complication of expanded

consciousness by calling into question even its potential for subversion.

Modernist “visionary” painter Simon (Richard Leduc) is in the midst of a

crisis of inspiration motivated by his dissatisfaction with the contemporary

art world: “Art galleries have become laboratories, discotheques, space

rockets,” he claims, “But in their attempt to conquer outer space they’ve lost

track of their inner space.” After coming home from a cocktail party where he

laments to his friend Laurent (Serge Gainsbourg) and fights with his

girlfriend Angela (Danièle Gaubert), Simon begins to experience flashes of

temporal distortion he attributes to a drag of “tea.” Eventually, however,

these distortions transform into extended “visions” of the past and the future.

While Simon’s “future vision” initially appears as a surreal

literalization of his role as artist, his “visionary” power paradoxically puts an

end to his productivity and further estranges him from his lover and friends.

In X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes, Dr. X’s x-ray vision provides far more

information than can be controlled or even schematized, perhaps expressing

an anxiety at the rise of a scientific culture of data unmoored from

meaningful frames of interpretation. Likewise, in Paris n’existe pas Simon

                                                                                                               
15 American examples of time-travel paradoxes in this period include The Time
Travelers (1964) and Journey to the Center of Time (1967), both of which also feature
their characters caught in uncanny (and unbreakable) time-loops.

157  
 
 
can predict when a vase and milk bottle will break but cannot prevent them

from doing so. As in a futurist painting, he begins to see moment overlaid

upon moment, as his flat’s present shape becomes overlaid within its image

as it appeared in the 1930s [complete with its unknowingly exhibitionistic

tenant (Denise Péron)]. However, this spectacle of this power incapacitates

him with confusion and marvel instead of providing some kernel of hidden

knowledge just below the surface of appearances. Simon’s power does not

therefore provide a practical justification for the traversal of “inner space.”

Entranced by his power, he ignores his political friends. When the power

disappears as easily as it came, it remains to him a fundamentally

unexplainable enigma without apparent lessons. If Je t’aime je t’aime uses

the notion of expanded consciousness as a means to question the most basic

epistemological and ontological assumptions, Paris n’existe pas asks whether

the achievement of expanded consciousness is sufficient to establish new

practices or social forms.

The enigmatic ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey provides a triumphant

counterpoint to both French New Wave films by retaining the art cinematic

focus on the astronaut Dave (Keir Dullea)’s incomprehensible experiences.

The screenplay’s co-author, Arthur C. Clarke, intended the film as

propaganda for the space program, hoping that broader support for science

would emerge: “If the conquest of space served no other purpose, it would give

158  
 
 
us the new mental and emotional horizons which our age needs more

desperately than most people yet realize” (1968, D1). In promoting the notion

that such enigmas represent abstract Utopian horizons, 2001: A Space

Odyssey therefore relies as much on the allure of an enigmatic Siren call as it

does on definable philosophical questions.

Contrary to Clarke’s intentions, however, Kubrick suggests that such

advances in concrete knowledge are ultimately irrelevant to the inevitable,

all-encompassing process of human evolution:

What happens at the end of [2001: A Space

Odyssey] must tap the subconscious for its power. . .
. To do this one must bypass words and move into
the world of dreams and mythology. This is why the
literal clarity one has become so used to is not
there. But what is there has visceral clarity. It is
for this reason that people are responding so
emotionally. The film is getting to them in a way
they are not used to. Obviously, in making the film
we had to have some specifics in order to design,
build and shoot. This has no value to the viewer
even if he thinks otherwise.
. . . In the Jupiter orbit, Keir Dullea is swept
into a stargate. Hurtled through fragmented
regions of time and space, he enters into another
dimension where the laws of nature as we know
them no longer apply. In the unseen presence of

159  
 
 
 godlike entities, beings of pure energy who have
evolved beyond matter, he finds himself in what
might be described as a human zoo, created from
his own dreams and memories.
He sees himself age in a time-mirror, much as
you might see yourself in a space-mirror. His entire
life passes in what appears to him as a matter of
moments. He dies and is reborn—transfigured; an
enhanced being, a star-child. The ascent from ape
to angel is complete. (Kubrick, quoted in Weiler
1968, D19)

The framework rests on the spiritual (rather than scientific) notion

that inner space (the “world of dreams and mythology”) and outer space (the

Jupiter orbit) provide two vantages on the same mysterious story of

evolution. If, unlike Je t’aime je t’aime or Paris n’existe pas, 2001: A Space

Odyssey appears to conflate evolution with “necessary progress,” recall that

in the section above on “Hegemonic Space” I noted that Kubrick’s film is

subject to a diversity of conflicting readings. In the next section, I will return

to both gender representations and counter-hegemonic depictions of evolution

in a number of films in order to bring out the ways in which undermining

social assumptions of gender ultimately provided a more generative

framework in the sixties for exploring “new tribes, and new patterns of

living.”

160  
 
 
Space Camp and Sexual Evolution

If reading HAL as gay provides fodder for a camp viewing of 2001: A

Space Odyssey (1968), “camp” is invoked in nearly every contemporaneous

review of Barbarella (1968). Camp space stories have provided a privileged

alternative viewing position for quite some time. In Chapter Two, I described

the tendency toward increasing objective and subjective realism as an

evolution of tropes within the fifties paranoid “weirdies.” Likewise, the

explicit invocation of camp in Barbarella (and perhaps 2001: A Space Odyssey

as well) can be seen as an extension of an earlier tendency toward camp and

burlesque within fifties space exploration films. If homosexuality in Classical

Hollywood is often identified with ethnic exoticism,16 then it is perhaps not

surprising that the Hollywood depiction of extraterrestrials as radical

“others” has simultaneously tended to invoke both categories. As early as

Just Imagine (1930), for instance, Earthling travelers to Mars encounter a

kingdom dominated by an exotic queen (camp figure Joyzelle Joyner)17 and

her gay royal retainer (Ivan Linow), leading to the exchange “She’s not the

Queen, he is!”18 In the fifties, space camp is identifiable especially in a cycle

                                                                                                               
16 Adrienne McLean (1997) addresses the overlapping codes of exoticism and
homosexual camp in Hollywood.
17 Richard Barrios (2003, 90) profiles Joyzner within a camp frame.
18 David Lugowski notes the Studio Relations Committee files on the film contain
the request to “make it appear that he is ‘queer’” (1999, 22).

161  
 
 
of independently produced films based around the notion of alien worlds

controlled by domineering women, often threatening to colonize or destroy

the Earth and seeking to subjugate Earthmen.19 As in the female vampire

model, the alien women are often coded as lesbians20, especially in Cat-

Women of the Moon (1953) in which a group of “cat-women” control the Earth

ship’s female navigator through a program of interstellar mind control and

“moon worship.” As soon as the men arrive, however, the Amazons

immediately succumb, flirting and flocking to respond to their sexual

                                                                                                               
19 This story is told in slight variations in Cat-Women of the Moon (1953), Abbott and
Costello Go to Mars (1953), Fire Maidens from Outer Space (1956), Missile to the
Moon (1958), and Queen of Outer Space (1958), among others.
20 Benshoff discusses lesbian vampire motifs (1997, 149), which these films repeat.
For instance, the “amulet” is a common feature of space Amazon films. Benshoff also
notes the trope of secret homosexual societies within popular culture (1997, 99). An
additional narrative theme these films have in common is the fifties dystopian
scenario of an ancient, fallen or failing civilization. In Fire Maidens from Outer
Space, the alien world discovered on the 13th moon of Jupiter is the colony of “New
Atlantis.” Like the Krell society of Forbidden Planet (1956), these falling or fallen
societies are quasi-Utopian, doomed by one crucial flaw: but this time, it is the lack
of men. In Abbott and Costello Go to Mars, the Venusians have figured out how to
live forever. But in most cases, the women cannot be too intelligent if they cannot
figure out that their society is doomed without procreation. In most cases doom
comes indirectly. In Fire Maidens from Outer Space, the last man is dying out and
the women just cannot figure out how to kill the monster that threatens them. In
Cat-Women on the Moon and Missile to the Moon, the moon is running out of oxygen.
The sex and procreation problem is thus only one aspect of these films’ disaster
theme. In these films, the societies are doomed because women cannot rule.

162  
 
 
advances. Eventually, the “good” girls go with the male conquerors [Fig. 4.4],

while the “bad” ones perish.

Fig. 4.4: Professor Konrad (Paul Birch) captivates the Venusian women in Queen of
Outer Space (1958), a prototypical “space camp” film.

While anti-feminism (perhaps ambiguously mingled with masochistic

male fantasies) certainly provides a cultural framework with which to

understand this sub-cycle of astronaut films, their focus on exaggerated

gender characteristics and role reversal nevertheless provides the basis for

the ironic viewing position Jack Babuscio calls “camp irony” (Babuscio 1999,

120). This is because films depicting an alien society with a “topsy-turvy” sex

hierarchy create exaggerated theatrical inversions of gender, which help to

undermine the narratives’ apparent ideological normativity. In Abbott and

Costello Go to Mars (1953), for instance, the voluptuous queen briefly allows

163  
 
 
Lou to play king, only to reveal how foolish a Costello king would look in a

world of beautiful statuesque females [Fig. 4.5]. In a further sequence

featuring posing male fitness models, it is revealed that the “old” King of

Venus, despite his rippling physique, was incapable of “pleasing” the queen,

providing a winking gay subtext ripe for camp viewing.

Fig. 4.5: Lou Costello makes an unimposing king of Mars in Abbott & Costello Go to
Mars (1953).

164  
 
 
 A female-directed burlesque on this formula can be found in Doris

Wishman’s “grade Z” exploitation film Nude on the Moon (1961) (which also

provides the unique example of the female-directed sixties space exploration

film). Although Nude on the Moon begins as typical space exploration, the

film’s first scenes also set up as a romance b-story centered on the plain lab

assistant Cathy (Marietta)’s lovesickness for astronaut Jeff (Lester Brown).

Cathy commands the scenes she appears in and is given a running voice-over

commentary in which she describes her desire for Jeff’s affections. When the

male astronauts reach the moon, they soon discover a naturist paradise. As

in the earlier films described, they find a Queen of the moon (also Marietta)

with whom Jeff quickly falls in love. Unlike the earlier films, however, there

is no conflict between the astronauts and aliens. Instead, the astronauts

return to Earth, where Jeff realizes that Cathy is the spitting image of the

Queen. Expectations are repeatedly reversed: Cathy pursues Jeff rather than

vice versa, a Queen of the moon reigns serenely, and the overtly feminized

Queen is eventually identified in the visage of an average assistant.21

                                                                                                               
21 Pamela Robertson argues “for the crucial role of heterosexual women as producers
and consumers of camp” (1999, 271). Wishman’s work for instance calls attention to
ways in which “camp’s appeal [for feminists] resides in its potential to function as a
form of gender parody” (Robertson 1999, 272). Although an exploitation director, her
films provide a wide-ranging exploration of sex relations. For feminist appreciations
of Wishman see Moya Luckett (2003) and Tania Modleski (2007).

165  
 
 
 The mid-sixties New York Underground filmmakers would frequently

dabble in space anthropology films and, in doing so, would explicitly invoke

such a camp reading of aliens, androids, and monsters. Andy Warhol would

frequently claim the “B” Creation of the Humanoids (1962), with its

androgynous and emotionless android “humanoids,” as his favorite film

(Fujiwara 2004, 153). Mike Kuchar’s Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965) would

provide a catalog of space camp figures by populating his Flash Gordon-

inspired tale of perverse android love between “Fleshapoids” Xar (Bob

Cowan) and Melenka (Maren Thomas) with the gay Prince Gianbeno (George

Kuchar), his extravagant wife Princess Vivianna (Donna Kerness), and her

beefcake boyfriend Ernie (Julius Middleman).22 Although (as I noted above) a

number of fifties sf films leant themselves to camp readings, Sins of the

Fleshapoids is especially indicative of the growing importance of camp,

parallel to the impact of Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” (1964) on mainstream

critical discourse, as a broad trend within sixties film culture [and one which

mediated that culture’s appreciation of both avant-garde and trash cinema

[(Rosenbaum 2004b, 131; Monaco 2003, 45)]. As Vogue noted in 1968, “Even

films that would once have been esoteric film society fare, like George

                                                                                                               
22 Carlos Kase notes “The Fleshapoids make love by exchanging electricity and
shooting lightning from their fingertips, a visual detail that perhaps confirms the
popular rumor that the film was a considerable influence on [Barbarella]” (1999,
160).

166  
 
 
Kuchar’s Hold Me while I’m Naked, or his brother Michael’s Sins of the

Fleshapoids, are in public theaters now” (Alloway 1968, 186).23

Flanking both exploitation and underground cinema was gay

experimental filmmaker Curtis Harrington’s Queen of Blood (1966), produced

for AIP, which contrasts a corny heterosexual coupling with, for instance, a

campy starring turn from Basil Rathbone. Notably, in a contemporaneous

interview in The Los Angeles Times, Harrington would claim the work of

Josef von Sternberg (both Sontag’s and Babuscio’s leading exemplar of camp

cinema) as his main stylistic influence on the film (K. Thomas 1966, C15).24

The plot of Queen of Blood provocatively re-iterates familiar sf themes.

After an extraterrestrial vessel lands on Mars, American astronauts

(including John Saxon and Dennis Hopper) travel to the planet in the hope of

making contact. While they find the ship abandoned, they eventually discover

a lone survivor in an escape capsule on one the planet’s moons. This survivor

is a mysterious green-skinned, mute woman (Florence Marly) [Fig. 4.6],

                                                                                                               
23 Greg Taylor claims that the tendency toward the appreciation of camp represented
a cultural rejection of established cultural standards without the sacrifice of
connoisseurship (1999, 79). Ultimately, while camp within its initial context of queer
urban experience could express a critical distance toward repressive social order,
camp appeals to bourgeois sensibilities because it encourages a viewing position of
critical detachment (Bourdieu 1987, 28).
24 In “Notes on Camp,” Sontag writes, “Camp is the outrageous aestheticism of von
Sternberg’s six American movies with Dietrich, all six, but especially the last, The
Devil Is a Woman” (1966, 283).

167  
 
 
whom the astronauts discover to be a vampire. When she is scratched in a

struggle, however, she quickly dies after bleeding out green blood in Grand

Guignol fashion (“A hemophiliac. Perhaps she was some sort of royalty where

she came from . . . a queen”). In the end, they discover she “was a queen, a

queen bee” when they discover her royal egg sacks “hidden all over the ship”

[Fig. 4.7]. The film concludes back on Earth with Dr. Farraday (Basil

Rathbone) smiling over a tray of the quivering eggs.

Fig. 4.6: The Martian “queen” (Florence Marly) is a puzzling sight in Queen of Blood
(1966).

168  
 
 
 Fig. 4.7: Martian eggs represent exciting future possibilities in Queen of Blood
(1966).

It is hardly difficult to draw out a camp reading of this story as an

ironic take on the McCarthy-era pop cultural association between

homosexuality and “alien monsters,” especially with the film’s final

association of its two coded “queens.” However, Queen of Blood also invites a

mainstream camp reading on the level of form by overloading its narrative

with “corny” exaggerations of sf conventions from the thirties through the

fifties (terrible dialogue, “modernistic” music, overblown modern costumes

and sets, cheesy scientific optimism). In addition, it is assembled by

combining newly shot footage with existing footage from a Soviet film,

thereby adding a further layer of irony and distanciation.

169  
 
 
 Lisa Parks claims that Barbarella raises the specter of a “female

astronaut who [is] sexy, single, and political” in order to “immerse [her] in an

excessively feminized and campy mise-en-scène,” resulting in a parodic

narrative that “ridicules the viability of the female astronaut” (1999, 261).

However, the film’s ironic camp frame precisely complicates such a reading.

Cynthia Baron and Mark Bernard for instance claim that “Jane Fonda’s

performance . . . was a cult favorite, not because connoisseurs saw moments

of authenticity, but because cult audiences enjoyed the film’s camp qualities”

such as “scenes of Fonda peeling off extravagantly campy costumes in

outrageous, overblown sets like her fur-lined spaceship” (2013, 272). In other

words, if Barbarella is excessively feminized, her feminine excess calls

attention to gender as a series of performances that can be individually

shaped and molded within a fluid Utopian space.

A distinction may however be made between Barbarella’s evidently

Utopian avatars (which includes a literal angel in the form of John Philip

Law’s Pygar) and the abject figures of the vampiric Queen, awkward

Fleshapoids, and horribly disfigured Lt. Dan from First Man Into Space

(1959). In Planet of the Apes (1968), the audience is frequently reminded that

for the apes, Charlton Heston’s Taylor is “so damn ugly.” Unlike Barbarella,

these figures represent radical difference as a form of monstrosity resistant to

visual and ideological assimilation and thereby provide the opportunity for

170  
 
 
audience cross-identification with social outcasts, as Benshoff (1997) has

suggested.25

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri explicitly elicit this sense of

monstrosity as a form of revolutionary agency in their claim that “the

vampire, its monstrous life, and its insatiable desire has become symptomatic

not only of the dissolution of an old society but also the formation of a new”

(2005, 193). In the films discussed in this chapter, this monstrosity is linked

especially to the transgressing of sexual and gender norms, which becomes a

recurrent metaphor for transgressing and surpassing the essential limits of

the human.

Gaylyn Studlar claims that even “though midnight movies often revel

in breaking sexual taboos through homosexuality and inverted sex roles or

cross-dressing, these elements suggest a contemporary ‘sexual revolution’

that does not necessarily question the hierarchical status of gender or the

patriarchal power imbalance in sexual practice” (1991, 141-2). Not

necessarily, but unlike other generic forms, I would argue that sf does seem

often explicitly to question these practices and hierarchies as a form to evolve

                                                                                                               
25 Viewer identification with monsters is also a longstanding concern of a
psychoanalytic approach to spectatorship, as in Carol Clover’s reading (1992).
Subsequent pop cultural representations of “queer aliens” [such as David Bowie’s
Ziggy Stardust and Dr. Frank-N-Furter from The Rocky Horror Show (1975)] would
however reverse this trend in favor of Barbarella’s glamour.

171  
 
 
past. If Mark Gallagher (2010) suggests a consistent wariness in the sixties

LSD film “against the possibility of a polymorphous male sexuality” in films

such as Easy Rider (1969) and Performance (1970), then it should be

remembered that an especially large number of sf films from the period

[including Sins of the Fleshapoids, Vinyl (1965), 2001: A Space Odyssey, A

Clockwork Orange (1971), and especially the later The Rocky Horror Picture

Show (1975) and David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

(1973)] have elicited a significant number of queer readings.26 It is within

this reception context that Janes’s otherwise outré notion of the star-child as

“queer rebirth” (2011, 72) suddenly comes into focus.27

The genre not only increasingly allowed for such an alignment but also

elicited it. Kubrick’s 1968 Playboy interview, which uniquely matches

Jameson’s exuberance for the radical confrontation with “limits,” even seems

to privilege such a reading:

Through drugs, or perhaps via the sharpening or

even mechanical amplification of latent ESP
functions, it may be possible for each partner to

                                                                                                               
26 Star Trek has especially elicited a number of queer readings. P.J. Falzone (2005)
situates this phenomenon within a Utopian context.
27 Even still, the analogy of queerness with alienness is perhaps mundane when
compared with the confrontation of the more radical forms of otherness found in
literary sf. Star Trek often attempted such more radical presentations of alienness,
as in the episode “Devil in the Dark” (1967), which depicts a “silicon-based lifeform.”

172  
 
 
 simultaneously experience the sensations of the
other, or we may eventually emerge into
polymorphous sexual beings, with the male and
female components blurring, merging and
interchanging. The potentialities for exploring new
areas of sexual experience are virtually boundless.
(Kubrick, quoted in Agel 1970, 346)

It seems to me highly probable that David Cronenberg’s Stereo (1969)

and Crimes of the Future (1970) derive their plots from this or similar

statements by Kubrick. At the very least, they both explore changes to the

social and biological function and behavior of sexuality alongside the

influence of drugs and ESP [Fig. 4.8].28 However, as I have shown, a

preponderance of the era’s exploration and evolution films attempt to

consider the expansion of social limits by calling into question the social (and

biological) determinations of sex and gender. Sexual difference, like the

Queen of Blood, seems to provide an initially powerful yet ambiguous force

but is ultimately anemic. The same can be said of most assumptions, which

are rendered ambiguous and amorphous in this most Utopian of sixties sf

sub-genres.

                                                                                                               
28 That being said, exceptions can easily be found. In Charly (1968), for instance, a
surgery that increases the intelligence of the mentally handicapped title character
(Cliff Robertson) has the added effect of increasing his aggression and sexual
interest, leading to sexual promiscuity and rape.

173  
 
 
Fig. 4.8: Expanded consciousness and liberated sexuality intermingle in Stereo
(1969).

174  
 
 
Conclusion

This dissertation has followed a number of developments within sf

cinema throughout the sixties period, tracking in particular the

establishment of a body of progressive and intellectually and artistically

provocative films from within art, experimental, and prestige production

categories. In doing so, I have exposited three popular sub-genres—disaster,

dystopia, and exploration—through which cinematic practitioners and

audiences engaged several of the era’s Utopian (and Dystopian) discourses.

Throughout, I have described the remarkable variance of the sixties films

from their fifties antecedents.

In the fifties sf cycle, planetary and alien disaster films such as When

Worlds Collide (1951) and War of the Worlds (1953) had provided grand set-

pieces to display American military might shielding post-war American

prosperity from any imagined catastrophe, no matter how far-fetched. Set

amid the increasing U.S. and Soviet proliferation of thermonuclear weapons,

the realistic disaster films that followed On the Beach (1959) provided the

opportunity to address the true horrors of total devastation modern warfare

potentially enabled. In fifties films such as 1984 (1956) worldwide

Communism represented the ultimate future dystopia. But by the mid-

sixties, however, dystopian films such as Fahrenheit 451 (1966) depicting a

“corny future” would challenge even the basic ideological substrate of the

175  
 
 
Cold War—that is, the dichotomy between Communism and the “free

society”—by positing a form of oppressive “unfreedom” coextensive with post-

war American and European prosperity. Finally, throughout the fifties,

beginning with Rocketship X-M (1950), Cold War jingoism, sexism, and

colonial-imperialist attitudes marked the space exploration genre. By the end

of the sixties, paralleling the rise of the popular counterculture, even this

“space conquest” genre mutated into a multi-faceted Utopian exploration of

expanded ideological paradigms, evidenced by the profoundly “open texts” of

films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

This work has both supplied the necessary historical groundwork and

the specific arguments to make these previously un-synthesized claims

glaringly apparent. Indeed, now that I have laid out this evidence and

argumentation it seems to me remarkable that this period of sf cinema has

not previously received an extended analysis along these lines. Above all else,

this is no doubt because a large number of non-U.S. films remain largely

unseen and are often unfortunately relegated to “cult” status despite their

many provocative appeals. A number of the films I have noted throughout

[including Il nuovo mondo (1963), Omicron (1963), Marcia nuzale (1965), Il

seme dell’uomo (1969), Paris n’existe pas (1969), and Stereo (1969)] are almost

entirely absent in discussions of sf and exist mostly in critical discussions of

their authors, genre, or era, while others are seldom discussed on any

176  
 
 
grounds. A significant number remain commercially unavailable.1 If nothing

else, then, I hope to have demonstrated that 2001: A Space Odyssey was

indeed not the only—or only significant—sf film of the period. I also hope to

have shown that a generic context can add tremendously to the appreciation

of certain auteurist works, which emerge as powerful interventions into the

popular discourses genres help to frame. This rule seems as true of films from

director-centered modes of production as in genre-centered modes (e.g. film

noirs within which auteur and genre are already critically entwined).

If this project’s aggregation of a wide number of films from within a

“sixties sf genre” context has therefore yielded a previously obscured

wellspring of intriguing projects, additional research is nonetheless necessary

to establish further the parameters of the demonstrated sf-sixties conjunction

as well as its larger significance. When considering to what extent my

findings correspond to the total field of “sixties sf” the question of my sample

selection is of primary importance. Initially, I intended to look specifically at

discourses on taste surrounding films that were simultaneously “sf” and “art”

films. In order to do so, I planned to focus precisely on the sf art films

produced between 1965-1970, the years during which sociologist Shyon

Baumann found a popular “high art” peak in the cinematic field (2007, 123).

                                                                                                               
1 That is, in the decades following their initial release. They were each circulated
internationally, including in the U.S., in the 1960s.

177  
 
 
As I realized that the subversive appeals of these films outweighed their

status as “art objects,” I decided to broaden the scope of my project to align

with the “sixties” as a progressive era [as defined by scholars including

Jameson (1984) and Todd Gitlin (1987)]. I then became aware that an

apparent gap in sf film history (encompassing the period between the

“market saturation” of the late fifties cycle and the return to various larger-

budget Hollywood cycles in 1970) overlapped almost precisely with the period

of explicitly anti-war atomic disaster films (which began in 1959 and trailed

off after 1971). I decided, then, that 1959-1971 would provide my “sixties sf”

period. Despite its practicality, however, this 1971 cut-off now seems too

early.2

In seeking out a variety of films from this 1959-1971 period, I viewed

approximately one forth of the nearly 600 feature-length sf films produced

internationally, as well as fifty films from the years 1950-1958 in order to

achieve a sense of genre expectations elicited by the fifties cycle.

Nevertheless, I should admit several specific gaps in my viewing. Notably

absent were a large number of additional Italian and Japanese films,

                                                                                                               
2 Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) continues to re-imagine 20th-century cycles of trauma
and war as time paradox in the vein of “The Time Element” (1958) and la jetée
(1962), while Louis Malle’s film d’anticipation Black Moon (1975) provides an even
more abstract depiction of a war between men. Sleeper (1973) may be the key comic
cinematic visualization of a Huxleyian future dystopia, while Flesh Gordon (1974)
represents a full flowering of the internal contractions of space camp.

178  
 
 
especially from “genre auteurs” including Ishirô Honda and Antonio

Margheriti, which I will attempt to rectify at some future point. More

glaringly, in limiting my project to the U.S.-dominated West, I ignored the

tremendous number of Soviet Bloc sf productions and reception contexts

(which would no doubt provide an important alternative presentation of the

same historical period from the cultural perspectives of the Soviet world).

Finally, in focusing entirely on film at the expense of sixties sf literature and

television, I no doubt missed several significant narrative commonalities and

differences in sf across media which will likely make more complex any

claims about the relations of these films to social, cultural, and political

contexts. Domestically produced Hollywood television in particular would

seem to provide a useful counterpoint to the auteurist co-productions

produced abroad, though the contemporaneous The Twilight Zone (1959-

1964) and Star Trek (1966-1969) seem to abide largely by the critical genre

parameters I have noted. Indeed, as argued by Peter Frase (2010), Star Trek

may come the closest to a popularly imagined Utopian Communist future

within all of popular culture (that is, it depicts a “post-scarcity” economy).

If these considerations would no doubt help further to fill-in the

understanding of “sixties sf” I have already begun to establish, they would

not necessarily amount to the claim that sixties sf cinema represented a

uniquely progressive, intellectually and aesthetically significant period for

179  
 
 
either the genre or popular cinema more generally. Recall that I began from a

consideration of the canonization of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,

with the relationship between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars (1977) in

particular frequently representing in criticism and scholarship the distinction

between the earlier Hollywood and the post-Jaws (1975) period Thomas

Schatz has described as the industrial move “from renaissance to

retrenchment” (2004, 11). David E. James gives a more elegiac description of

the same perceived phenomenon: if, in the sixties, a faltering Hollywood

system had allowed artists and audiences to resurrect the cinematic form

from the artistic lifelessness of a through-and-through commodity by

reinterpreting its “advanced technologies; its ability to represent both

superficial, physical details and interior states of tension; the universality of

its appeal; and finally its youth” from within a generational context of “social

urgency” (1989, 347-348), in the interceding years a re-established

conglomerate-Hollywood had brought the medium back into the fold of the

“totalized industrial system” (1989, 350-1). “If any function remains for these

[sixties] films,” James writes, “it will not be separable from that of breaking

open this closure with invocations of other forms of social life” (1989, 351).

That is to say, the re-encounter with the sixties experiments seems to provide

a Utopian space within which that which is today barred within mainstream

popular culture was amazingly once allowed entry. A pertinent example in

180  
 
 
my case is that the basic conceit, style, and premise of Je t’aime je t’aime

(1968), once a tragedy, returned in the “indie sub-division” Hollywood hit

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) (now a Romantic comedy

amended by a happy “boy-gets-girl-back-again” ending).

I have only begun to answer the question of whether the sixties

production atmosphere was either uniquely quasi-Utopian or one of a number

of such epochs, but I imagine the answer is more complicated than either

alternative—just as the conventional wisdom that 2001: A Space Odyssey was

the only significant sixties sf film now seems entirely erroneous. The next

step will be, therefore, to keep tracing the provocative engagement with the

Utopian in sf cinema as it has continued to evolve. This pursuit will

necessarily be defined by both hope and skepticism: if I have learned nothing

else from this project, it is that the discovery of subversive Utopian works is

often unforeseen and invariably provokes a frisson of disbelief as one is

struck by the fantastic expressions of what would otherwise seem

“impossible” from within the myriad constraints of a popular medium.

181  
 
 
References

Adler, Renata. 1968. “The Screen: ‘2001’ Is Up, Up and Away: Kubrick’s

Odyssey in Space Begins Run; Godard’s ‘La Chinoise’ a Theater of

Ideas.” The New York Times, April 4: 58.

Adorno, Theodor. 1967. Prisms. Translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber.

Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

———, 1973. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. New York:

Seabury Press.

Agel, Jerome. 1970. The Making of Kubrick’s 2001. New York: New American

Library.

Aldiss, Brian. 1974. Billion Year Spree: The True Story of Science Fiction.

New York: Schocken Books.

———, 2004. “Oh No, Not More Sci-Fi!” PMLA 119, 3 (May 2004): 509-512.

Alloway, Lawrence. 1968. “More Skin, More Everything in Movies.” Vogue

151 (3): 186, 187, 213.

Andersson, Jenny. 2012. “The Great Future Debate and the Struggle for the

World.” American Historical Review 117 (5): 1411-1430.

Andreotti, Libero. 2000. “Play-Tactics of the ‘Internationale Situationniste.”

October 91: 36-58.

Anshen, David. 2007. “Alphaville: A Neorealist, Science Fiction Fable About

182  
 
 
 Hollywood.” In Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema, edited by Laura

E. Ruberto and Kristi M. Wilson, 91-110. Detroit, MI: Wayne State

University Press.

Ashley, Michael. 2005. Transformations: The Story of the Science –Fiction

Magazines from 1950 to 1970. Liverpool University Press.

Baron, Cynthia and Mark Bernard. 2013. “Cult Connoisseurship and

American Female Stars in the Sixties: Valuing a Few Withered Tits in

the Midst of a Mammary Renaissance.” In Cult Film Stardom: Offbeat

Attractions and Processes of Cultification, edited by Kate Egan and

Sarah Thomas, 259-275. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Barrios, Richard. 2003. Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison

to Stonewall. New York: Routledge.

Bart, Peter. 1965. “Nuclear ‘Incident’ at Sea.” The New York Times August 8,

X7.

Barthes, Roland. 1975. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard

Miller. New York: HarperCollins.

Baumann, Shyon. 2007. Hollywood Highbrow: From Entertainment to Art.

Princeton University Press.

Baxter, John. 1970. Science Fiction in the Cinema. New York: Paperback

Library.

Beck, Bernard. 1971. “The Overdeveloped Society: THX 1138.” Trans-Action 8

183  
 
 
 (11): 60-79.

Becker, Howard Saul. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press.

Benjamin, Walter. 2002. “Conversations with Brecht.” Translated by Anna

Bostock. In Aesthetics and Politics, 86-99. London: Verso.

Benshoff, Harry M. 1997. Monsters In The Closet: Homosexuality And The

Horror Film. Manchester University Press.

———, 2001. “The Short-Lived Life of the Hollywood LSD Film.” Velvet Light

Trap 47: 29-44.

Berg, Charles Ramírez. 2011. “The Manchurian Candidate: Compromised

Agency and Uncertain Causality.” In A Little Solitaire: John

Frankenheimer and American Film, edited by Murray Pomerance and

R. Barton Palmer, 29-47. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University

Press.

Bersani, Leo. 1989. “Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature.” Representations 25:

99-118.

Biskind, Peter. 1983. Seeing Is Believing: How I Learned to Stop Worrying

and Love the Fifties. New York: Pantheon Books.

———, 1985. “Pods, Blobs, and Ideology in American Films of the Fifties.” In

Shadows of the Magic Lamp: Fantasy and Science Fiction in Film,

edited by George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin, 58-72. Carbondale:

184  
 
 
 Southern Illinois University Press.

Birstein, Ann. 1967. “Vogue’s Notebook: Movies: The Day the Fish Came

Out.” Vogue 150 (7): 68.

Bluestone, George. 1967. “The Fire and the Future.” Film Quarterly 20 (4): 3-

10.

Boettger, Suzaan. 2012. “This Land Is Their Land.” Art Journal 71 (4): 125-

129.

Bohn, Willard. 1977. “From Surrealism to Surrealism: Apollinaire and

Breton.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 36 (2): 197-210.

Booker, M. Keith. 2001. Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War:

American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946-1964.

Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1987. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of

Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.

Boyer, Paul. 1984. “From Activism to Apathy: The American People and

Nuclear Weapons, 1963-1980. The Journal of American History 70, 4:

821-844.

Breton, André. 1969. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard

Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Brody, Richard. 2008. Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc

185  
 
 
 Godard. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Brown, Geoff. 1977. “The New Films.” Screen International 109: 18.

Buhle, Paul and Dave Wagner. 2003. Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood

Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950-2002. New York: Palgrave

Macmillan.

Burton, Stacy. 2014. Travel Narrative and the Ends of Modernity. The

Cambridge University Press.

Cagle, Chris. 2007. “Two Modes of Prestige Film.” Screen 48 (3): 291-311.

Chandler, Charlotte. 2001. I, Fellini. New York: Cooper Square Press.

Clarke, Arthur C. 1968. “Space Age Decade No. 2: A Prophecy.” The Los

Angeles Times, March 31, D1.

Claussen, Detlev. 2004. “The American Experience of the Critical Theorists.”

In Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader, edited by John Abromeit and

William Mark Cobb, 51-66. New York: Routledge.

Clover, Carol. 1992. Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender and the Modern

Horror Film. Princeton University Press.

Coe, Richard L. 1968. “’2001’ Flings Man Into Space.” The Washington Post,

April 14, E3.

Combs, James. 1993. “Pox-Eclipse Now: The Dystopian Imagination in

Contemporary Popular Movies.” In Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic

Idea In Postmodern Narrative Film, edited by Christopher Sharrett,

186  
 
 
 17-35. Washington, D.C.: Masionneuve Press.

Cowie, Peter. 2004. Revolution!: The Explosion of World Cinema in the

Sixties. New York: Faber and Faber.

Crowther, Bosley. 1964. “Hysterical Laughter: Further Thoughts on ‘Dr.

Strangelove’ and Its Jokes About the Bomb.” New York Times,

February 16, XI.

———, 1964a. “Movie Version of Book on Bomb Introduced.” New York Times

September 16, 36.

———, 1965. “Screen: ‘Alphaville,’ Festival Picture, at the Paris.”

New York Times, October 26, 49.

Csiscsery-Ronay Jr., Istvan. 2008. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction.

Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Cunningham, David and Jon Goodbun. 2006. “Marx, Architecture, and

Modernity.” In The Journal of Architecture 11 (2): 169-185.

Darke, Chris. 2005. Alphaville. London: Tauris.

Dean, Joan F. 1979. “Between ‘2001’ and ‘Star Wars.’” Journal of Popular

Film and Television 18: 32-41.

Decker, Mark T. 2009. “They Want Unfreedom and One-Dimensional

Thought? I’ll Give Them Unfreedom and One-Dimensional Thought:

George Lucas, THX-1138, and the Persistence of Marcusian Social

Critique in American Graffiti and the Star Wars Films.” Extrapolation

187  
 
 
 50 (3): 417-441.

Delevoy, Robert L. 1960. Bosch: Biographical and Critical Study. The Taste

of Our Times. Cleveland, OH: Skira.

Dempsey, Michael. 1971-1972. “War as Movie Theater: Two Films.” Film

Quarterly 25, (2): 33-36.

Dentith, Simon. 1995. “Imagination and Inversion in Nineteenth-Century

Utopian Writing.” In Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction

and Its Precursors, edited by David Seed, 137-152. Liverpool

University Press.

DeRosia, Margaret. 2003. “An Erotics of Violence: Masculinity and

(Homo)Sexuality in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.” In Stanley

Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, edited by Stuart Y. McDougal, 61-84.

Cambridge Film Handbooks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dezeuze, Anna. 2008. “Assemblage, Bricolage, and the Practice of Everyday

Life.” Art Journal 67 (1): 31-37.

Disch, Thomas M. 1998. The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science

Fiction Conquered the World. New York: Touchstone.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. 2009. Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia. New

Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Doherty, Thomas. 2002. Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of

American Movies in the ‘50s. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

188  
 
 
Dowd, James. 2007. Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy After

Deleuze and Guattari. New York, Rodopi.

Duchovnay, Gerald. 2008. “From Big Screen to Small Box: Adapting Science

Fiction Film for Television.” In The Essential Science Fiction Television

Reader, edited by J.P. Telotte, 69-92. Lexington: University Press of

Kentucky.

Ebert, Roger. 2002. The Great Movies. New York: Broadway Books.

Elkins, Charles. 1979. “Science Fiction versus Futurology: Dramatic versus

Rational Models.” Science Fiction Studies 6 (1): 20-31.

Falzone, P.J. 2005. “The Final Frontier Is Queer: Aberrancy, Archetype, and

Audience Generated Folklore in K/S Slashfiction.” Western Folklore 64

(3/4): 243-261.

Fer, Briony, David Batchelor, and Paul Wood. 1993. Realism, Rationalism,

Surrealism: Art Between the Wars. Modern Practices and Debates.

London: The Open University.

Firchow, Peter Edgerly. 2007. Modern Utopian Fiction: From H.G. Wells to

Iris Murdoch. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press.

Fitting, Peter. 1974. “SF Criticism in France.” Science Fiction Studies 1 (3):

173-181.

———, 2010. “Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction.” In The

Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, 135-153. The Cambridge

189  
 
 
 University Press.

Franklin, H. Bruce. 1966. Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the

Nineteenth Century: An Anthology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Frase, Peter. 2010. “Anti-Star Trek: A Theory of Posterity.” The Peter Frase

Blog, December 14. http://www.peterfrase.com

Freedman, Carl. 1998. “Kubrick’s 2001 and the Possibility of Science-Fiction

Cinema.” Science Fiction Studies 25 (2): 300-318.

Fujiwara, Chris. 2004. “Intonation Please: The Creation of the Humanoids.”

In The Science Fiction Film Reader, edited by Gregg Rickman, 153-

164. New York: Proscenium Publishers.

Gallagher, Mark. 2010. “Tripped Out: The Psychedelic Film and

Masculinity.” In Quarterly Review of Film and Video 21 (3): 161-171.

Gandesha, Samir. 2004. “Marcuse, Habermas, and the Critique of

Technology.” In Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader, edited by John

Abromeit and William Mark Cobb, 188-208. New York: Routledge.

Gans, Herbert J. 1999. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and

Evaluation of Taste. Revised and Updated Edition. New York: Basic

Books.

Geldzahler, Henry. 1964. “Movies: Fail-Safe/Fate Is the Hunter.” Vogue

144 (7): 100.

Gilliatt, Penelope. 1968. “After Man.” The New Yorker, April 13, 150-152.

190  
 
 
Gitlin, Todd. 1987. The Sixties: Days of Hope, Days of Rage. New York:

Bantam Books.

Glahn, Philip. 2007. Estrangement and Politicization: Bertolt Brecht and

American Art, 1967-1979. Ph.D. Dissertation. The City University of

New York.

Goffman, Erving. 1986. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of

Experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

Grant, Barry Keith. 2006. “Of Men and Monoliths: Science Fiction, Gender,

and 2001: A Space Odyssey.” In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space

Odyssey: New Essays, edited by Robert Kolker, 69-86. New York:

Oxford University Press.

Hanson, Ellis. 1993. “Technology, Paranoia and the Queer Voice.” Screen 34

(2): 137-161.

Harris, Mark. 2008. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the

New Hollywood. New York: Penguin Books.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in

the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Books.

Hatch, Robert. 1968. “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The Nation, June 3, 74.

Hayden, Tom. 2008. Writings for a Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden

Reader. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books.

Henahan, Donal. 1968. “The Avant-Groove: We’re All In It.” The New York

191  
 
 
 Times, July 7: D11.

Hoberman, J. and Jonathan Rosenbaum. 1983. Midnight Movies. New York:

Harper and Row.

Hodgens, Richard. 1959. “A Brief Tragical History of the Science Fiction

Film.” Film Quarterly 13 (2): 30-39.

Hong, Sungook. 2007. “Man and Machine in the 1960s.” Techné: Research in

Philosophy and Technology 11 (1). Available Online at

http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/SPT/v7n3/hong.html. Accessed

12/10/13.

Hunter, I.Q. 1999. “The Day the Earth Caught Fire.” In British Science

Fiction Cinema, edited by I.Q. Hunter, 99-112. New York: Routledge.

———, 2009. “Exploitation as Adaptation.” In Cultural Borrowings:

Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation, edited by Iain Robert

Smith, 8-33. A Scope e-book. Scope: An Online Journal of Film and

Television Studies. Available on-line at

http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/cultborr/Cultural_Borrowings_Fin

al.pdf. Accessed 02/16/14.

James, David E. 1989. Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties.

Princeton University Press.

James, Edward. 1994. Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century. Oxford

University Press.

192  
 
 
Jameson, Fredric. 1979. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” Social

Text 1: 130-148.

———, 1984. “Periodizing the ‘60s.” Social Text 9/10: 178-209.

———, 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and

Other Science Fictions. London: Verso.

Jancovich, Mark. 1996. Rational Fears: The American Horror Genre in the

1950s. Manchester University Press.

Janes, Dominic. 2011. “Clarke and Kubrick’s 2001: A Queer Odyssey.”

Science Fiction Film and Television 4 (1): 57-78.

Kase, Carlos. 2009. “Sins of the Fleshapoids (Review).” Science Fiction Film

and Television 2 (1): 159-161.

Kawin, Bruce. 1984. “The Mummy’s Pool.” In Planks of Reason: Essays on the

Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant, 3-19. Oxford: Scarecrow.

Kellner, Douglas. 1984. “From 1984 to One-Dimensional Man: Critical

Reflections on Orwell and Marcuse,” a paper presented to the

American Political Science Association Convention in August.

Available Online at

http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/from1984toonedimens

ional.pdf. (Accessed 4/24/14).

Kittler, Friedrich. 2012. “In the Wake of the Odyssey.” Cultural Politics 8,

(3): 413-427.

193  
 
 
Kloman, William. 1968. “In 2001, Will Love Be a Seven-Letter Word?” New

York Times, April 14, D15.

Knee, Adam. 1997. The American Science Fiction Film and Fifties Culture.

Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University.

Kohler, Charlie. 2002. “Stanley Kubrick Raps.” In The Making of 2001: A

Space Odyssey, edited by Stephanie Schwam and Jay Cocks, 245-257.

New York: Modern Library.

Kóvács, András Bálint. 2008. Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema,

1950-1980. Cinema and Modernity. The University of Chicago Press.

Latham, Rob. 2006. “New Worlds and the New Wave Fandom: Fan Culture

and the Reshaping of Science Fiction in the Sixties.” Extrapolation 47

(2): 296-315.

———, 2011. “Assassination Weapons: The Visual Culture of New Wave

Science Fiction.” In Cutting Across Media: Appropriation Art,

Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law, edited by Kembrew

McLeod & Rudolf Kuenzli, 276-289. Durham, NC: Duke University

Press.

Lee, Pamela M. 2004. Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s.

Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Lee, Walt. 1968. “Scientist’s Evaluation of ‘2001’ Saga of Things to Come.”

The Los Angeles Times, June 2, C14.

194  
 
 
Leslie, Christopher S. 2007. Social Science Fiction. Ph.D. Dissertation. The

City University of New York.

Lev, Peter. 1993. The Euro-American Cinema. Austin: University of Texas

Press.

Linden, George W. 1977. “Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to

Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and Erotic Displacement.” Journal

of Aesthetic Education 11 (1): 63- 83.

Luckett, Moya. 2003. “Sexploitation as Feminine Territory: the Films of Doris

Wishman.” In Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of

Oppositional Taste, edited by Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lázaro Reboll,

Julian Stringer, and Andy Willis, 142-156. Inside Popular Film.

Manchester University Press.

Lifton, Robert Jay. 1979. The Broken Connection: On Death and the

Continuity of Life. New York: Basic Books.

Lugowski, David M. 1999. “Queering the (New) Deal: Lesbian and Gay

Representation and the Depression-Era Cultural Politics of

Hollywood’s Production Code.” Cinema Journal 38 (2): 3-35.

Marcuse, Herbert. 2002. One-Dimensional Man. Routledge Classics Edition.

New York: Routledge.

Marwick, Arthur. 2012. The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France,

Italy, and the United States, ca. 1958-1974. London: Bloomsbury

195  
 
 
 Reader.

McCann, Richard Dyer. 1977. Hollywood in Transition. Westport, CT:

Greenwood Press.

McGilligan, Patrick and Paul Buhle. 1997. Tender Comrades: A Backstory of

the Hollywood Blacklist. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

McLean, Adrienne. 1997. “The Thousand Ways There Are to Move: Camp and

Oriental Dance in the Hollywood Musicals of Jack Cole.” In Visions of

the East: Orientalism in Film, edited by Matthew Bernstein and

Gaylyn Studlar, 130-157. Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Menville, Douglas. 1975. A Historical and Critical Survey of the Science

Fiction Film. New York: Arno Press.

Modleski, Tania. 2007. “Women’s Cinemas as Counter-phobic Cinema.” In

Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics,

edited by Jeffrey Sconce, 47-70. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Monaco, Paul. 2003. The Sixties: 1960-1969 (History of the American

Cinema). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Morgenstern, Joseph. 1968. “Kubrick’s Cosmos.” Newsweek, April 15, 97-100.

Moy, Timothy D. 2001. “The End of Enthusiasm: Science and Technology.” In

The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s, edited by David Farber

and Beth Bailey, 305-311. New York: Columbia University Press.

Moylan, Tom. 2001. “’Look Into the Dark’: On Dystopia and the Novum.” In

196  
 
 
 Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics

of Science Fiction and Utopia, edited by Patrick Parrinder, 51-71.

Durham, NC: The Duke University Press.

Nagl, Manfred. 1983. “The Science-Fiction Film in Historical Perspective.”

Translated by David Clayton. Science Fiction Studies 10 (3): 262-277.

Nama, Adilifu. 2008. Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film.

Austin: The University of Texas Press.

Nahin, Paul J. 1999. Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics,

and Science Fiction. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Nichols, Peter, Ed. 1999. New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies

Ever Made. New York: Times Books.

Noriega, Chon. 1987. “Godzilla and the Japanese Nightmare. When ‘Them!’

Is U.S.” Cinema Journal 27 (1): 63-77.

Pagetti, Carlo. 1979. “Twenty-Five Years of Science Fiction Criticism in Italy

(1953-1978). Science Fiction Studies 6 (3): 320-326.

———, 1987. “Science-Fiction Criticism in Italy, in and out of the

University.” Science Fiction Studies 14 (2): 261-266.

Palmer, R. Barton. 2006. “2001: The Critical Reception and the Generation

Gap.” In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey: New Essays, edited

by Robert Kolker, 13-28. New York: Oxford University Press.

Parks, Lisa. 1999. “Bringing Barbarella Down to Earth: The Astronaut and

197  
 
 
 Feminine Sexuality in the 1960s.” In Swinging Single: Representing

Sexuality in the 1960s, edited by Hilary Radner and Moya Luckett,

253-276. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Petersen, Stephen. 2009. Space-Age Aesthetics: Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein,

and the Postwar European Avant-Garde. University Park, PA: The

Pennsylvania State University.

Plank, Robert. 1960. “Science Fiction.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry

30 (4): 799-810.

Poruch, David. 1986. “Beckett’s Deconstruction of the Machine in The Lost

Ones.” L’espirit créateur 26 (4): 87-98.

Reid, Michelle. 2009. “Postcolonialism” In The Routledge Companion to

Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew W. Butler, Adam

Roberts, and Sherryl Vint, 256-266. New York: Routledge.

Rescher, Nicholas. 1997. Profitable Speculations: Essays On Current

Philosophical Themes. Lanham, MD: Rowland & Littlefield.

Robertson, Pamela. 1999. “What Makes the Feminist Camp?” In Camp: Queer

Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, edited by Fabio Cleto,

266-282. Edinburgh University Press, 1999.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. 1997. Movies as Politics. Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press.

———,2004a. Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons.

198  
 
 
 Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

———,2004b. “‘New Hollywood’ and the 60s Melting Pot.” In The Last Great

American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema of the 1970s, edited by

Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath and Noel King, 131-154.

Amsterdam University Press.

Russo, Joe and Larry Landsman. 2001. Planet of the Apes Revisited. New

York: St. Martin’s Press.

Ryan, Michael and Douglas Kellner. 1988. Camera Politica: The Politics and

Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood. Bloomington: Indiana University

Press.

Sanders, Steven M. 2008. “Picturing Paranoia: Interpreting Invasion of the

Body Snatchers.” In The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film, edited by

Steven M. Sanders, 55-72. Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press.

Sarris, Andrew. 1996. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-

1968. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.

Schatz, Thomas. 2004. “The New Hollywood.” In Hollywood, edited by

Thomas Schatz, 285-314. Critical Concepts in Cultural Studies. New

York: Routledge.

Schauer, Bradley. 2010. The Pulp Paradox: Science Fiction and the

Exploitation Tradition, 1950-1986. PhD dissertation, University of

Wisconsin-Madison.

199  
 
 
Schneider, Steven Jay. 2003. 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.

London: Quintessence.

Sobchack, Vivian. 1999. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film.

New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Sontag, Susan. 1965. “The Imagination of Disaster.” Commentary, October,

42-48.

———, 1966. Against Interpretation: And Other Essays. New York: Picador.

Spector, Judith A. 1981. “Science Fiction and the Sex War: A Womb of One’s

Own.” Literature and Psychology 31 (1): 21-32.

Siegel, Mark. 1985. “Foreigner as Alien in Japanese Science Fantasy

(L’étranger en tant que l‘autre dans le fantastique scientifique

japonais).” Science Fiction Studies 12 (3): 252-263.

Spiegel, Simon. 2008. “Things Made Strange: On the Concept of

‘Estrangement’ in Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 35 (3): 369-

385.

Spigel, Lynn. 1997. “White Flight.” In The Revolution Wasn’t Televised:

Sixties Television and Social Conflict, edited by Lynn Spigel and

Michael Curtin, 47-72. AFI Film Readers. New York: Routledge.

Staiger, Janet. 1997. “Hybrid or Inbred: The Purity Hypothesis and

Hollywood Genre History.” Film Criticism 22 (1): 5-20.

———, 2000. Perverse Spectators. New York: New York University Press.

200  
 
 
Stapenhorst, Ralph. 1968. “More ‘Space Odyssey’ Comments.” The Los

Angeles Times, July 7, C4.

Studlar, Gaylyn. 1991. “Midnight S/Excess: Cult Configurations of

‘Femininity’ and the Perverse.” In The Cult Film Experience: Beyond

All Reason, edited by J.P. Telotte, 138-155. Austin: The University of

Texas Press.

Suvin, Darko. 1972. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” College

English 34 (3): 372-382.

———, 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of

a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Sweeney, Louise. 1967. “’Privilege’ Focuses [sic] on Mod London.” The

Christian Science Monitor, April 8, 6.

Taylor, Greg. 1999. Artists In the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film

Criticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Thomas, John. 1966. “Alphaville.” Film Quarterly 20 (1): 48-51.

Thomas, Kevin. 1966. “Diamond in the Rough of Film Life.” The Los Angeles

Times, Jan 31, C15.

Truffaut, François. 1966. “The Journal of Fahrenheit 451.” Cahiers du

Cinema In English 5: 10-22.

———, 1967. “The Journal of Fahrenheit 451.” Cahiers du Cinema In English

7: 8-19.

201  
 
 
Tudor, Andrew. 1989. Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the

Horror Movie. Oxford: Blackwell.

Vogel, Amos. 1970. “One Festival Plus One.” The Village Voice, July 9, 51-57.

Wagner, Roy. 1981. The Invention of Culture. The University of Chicago

Press.

Walsh, Moira. 1954. Film Reviews. America 91 (July 3): 367

Webster, Patrick. 2010. Stanley Kubrick: A Critical Study of the Films from

Lolita Through Eyes Wide Shut. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Weiler, A.H. 1968. “Kazan, Kubrick and Keaton.” New York Times, April 28,

D19.

Williams, Raymond. “Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 15 (3): 356-360.

Wood, Robin. 1986. Hollywood from Reagan to Vietnam. New York: Columbia

University Press.

———, 2003. “Ideology, Genre, Auteur.” In Film Genre Reader III, edited by

Barry Keith Grant, 61-74. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Youngblood, Gene. 1970. Expanded Cinema. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co.

202